Signs of a Work-at-Home Scam

The following are classic signs of work-at-home scams. Please do take careful note of each one. More than one will appear on scam ads at any one time.

1. Outlandish claims of income (i.e. “Earn $1,000 a day working part-time!”). Scam ads claim that you can earn large amounts of money beginning in a short time, from minutes after paying the registration fee to a few days or two weeks.

2. The ad asks for a “registration” or “membership” fee before anything else. Legitimate employers don’t ask candidates to pay money to learn more about a job. If it is a legitimate job opening, how would a recruiter justify charging a fee? I've seen ads that say, "We have to charge a fee to make sure that you're serious". Imagine going for an interview and the employer says, "Have a seat. Now, before we get started, I'm going to need $39.95 from you. We have to make sure you're serious." Would you pay them? Of course not! So why would you pay someone who is claiming to be hiring just because it's on the internet?

3. Claims that “no skills or experience” is necessary. Managing remote employees is extremely challenging. Employers who hire and supervise telecommuters want highly skilled, experienced employees that they can trust. They have to be confident that they can perform their jobs with little or no supervision. This is why most telecommuters are required to work on-site for a certain period of time before they're allowed to work from home. In the “real” world, the vast majority of jobs (apart from internships or entry-level work) require some degree of experience, and proof of qualifications. Beware leads that say experience isn’t necessary, or that don’t ask you to provide your credentials.

4. Vague or non-existent job description. The vaguer a job listing is, the more likely it is to be a scam. There's nothing more aggravating to a recruiter than getting bombarded by resumes from unqualified candidates. This is why most legitimate job listings are very detailed. Real employers will always summarize in the ad what it is they expect you to do on the job. They want to make sure that only the ones that meet their criteria respond.

5. No contact information on the ad itself. If you cannot call someone to ask a question, or ask for a reference, then something is terribly wrong. A real employer wants to get the position filled, and if you are qualified, they want to convince you to work for them. You should be able to reach them (or someone in their company at least) directly.

6. Ads with extensive typographical errors or ALL CAPS ads are most likely scams. No one in his right mind would want to work for someone who cannot even spell correctly.

7. “Work-at-Home” is listed as a job title. In a legitimate job opening, the title of the job -- “Accountant,” “Web Designer,” “Medical Transcriptionist” -- is what you usually see first, and "work from home" is not a title. If it appears in the ad header there's a good chance it's a come-on. Scammers use this phrase extensively because they know that “work at home” is the phrase that so many people are eager to see.

8. No resume or proof of qualifications is requested (except for internships or entry level work).

9. The ad arrives as spam in your Bulk or Spam folder. You must wonder how did that person you’ve never met know you were looking for home-based work. More likely, it came from a scammer who has “harvested” your email address from a website, or purchased a list of email addresses from a business or from another scammer. Be careful how you handle the spam mail. Move it to your trash file without using the “remove me from this list” link that you may see at the bottom of the page. These links are often used to confirm that your email address is active, and clicking on them can result in even more spam.

10. Palm trees, multi-million dollar mansions, expensive sports cars, and shapely bikini clad girls on beaches appear in the ads. Legitimate employers rarely if ever use such props to enhance their ads.

11. Testimonials without solid proof of references.

12. Snapshots of “proof of earnings” appear on the ads.

13. You are pressured to act immediately.

14. Claims of access to “inside information” form part of the ad’s sales pitch.

15. Phrases such as “guaranteed markets” and “huge demand” appear in the ads.

16. If the ad sounds too good to be true, it most certainly is a scam. This is the number one sign of a scam.

A great majority of work-at-home job hunters rely on the website that carries the listing to screen out fraudulent listings. The truth is that most of them don't have the resources to screen every post. In fact, most sites carry a disclaimer stating that it is the job seeker's responsibility to screen potential employers. So, always bear in mind these classic signs of work-at-home scams.

Online Work-at-Home Scams (Part 4)

7. Chain Letters

Typical Ad -- "Make copies of this letter and send them to people whose names we will provide. All you have to do is send us ten dollars for our mailing list and labels. Look at the chart below and see how you will automatically receive thousands in cash return!!!"

This is a modern revival of the classic typewritten chain letter racket of old. The only individuals who benefit from chain letters are the mysterious few at the top of the chain who constantly change names, addresses, and post office boxes. They may even attempt to intimidate you by threatening bad luck, or try to impress you by describing themselves as successful professionals who know all about non-existent sections of alleged legal codes.

8. Online Business

This is the mother lode of scam bluster. Please take careful note of the cleverly worded rhetoric to have you falling head-over-heels to register.

Typical Ad -- "Start earning as much as $2000's by the end of this week! ... We actually train you and get you started working the first day! ... You will be guaranteed a position to start working with us from day one! Here are just some of the opportunities you will have access to:
Type basic transcripts
Fill simple marketing forms
Pay Per Click Data entry
Ad Submitter
Web Researchers
Paid to post in Blogs
Paid Survey
Paid Shopping
Paid Driving
Paid email/surfing
Telecommuting jobs
Several other paying entry level jobs

The pitch: You will be guaranteed a position after registration. You will be able to start your first paying assignment immediately after registration. (It is you who will be paying, not be paid - italics mine.)

You will have full access to 1000's of paying positions available currently. You will be given access to 1000's of companies ready for you to start working. (You are not told you have to be the one to search for jobs.)

At the end of every week you will be required to send your list of assignments completed. Which means, you will keep track of the assignments we send you and what you accomplished. We have made special arrangements for those wanted to be paid weekly. You may be paid by check, money order or through other payment systems. (Believe me, once you pay the expensive registration fee, you will not even be accorded a decent reply from these scammers. They don’t have any project monitoring board on their website.)

You will be taken to the training area within 24 hours after registration. We will access your skills and interests and get you started with your first paying assignment today. (There is no such training area.)

Assignments pay anywhere from $3.00 for quick 5-minute assignments to up to $75 for longer assignments. (I never received a single cent from the first paying job they sent me. Instead, I lost more than a hundred dollars due to the erroneous AdWords procedure they supplied.)

I do want to make this clear, we are a serious agency and we only want serious employees. If you are not a go-getter and you are not willing to follow through with your assignments, do not register. (This is reverse psychology to keep you off-balance.)

We have companies all over the world that relies on our service. We will support you and guide you at anytime. You must be serious about working from home and making a living for yourself.
Normally $99.00Today's Special Registration Price: ONLY $39.97!
(They dare insult your intelligence with these phony “discounts”.)

Once the quota has been fulfilled you will have to wait until our next enrollment! (Here, you are being pressured to make an immediate decision.)

As an appreciation to you for joining, you will receive several money making programs free.* (No such frills.)

So there you have it. A detailed overview of how these scams are being posted on the Internet. On my next post, I will outline to you the fifteen or more signs of a work-at-home scam on the Internet.

Online Work-at-Home Scams (Part 3)

The continuation of the detailed List of the Most Common Work-at-Home Scams on the Internet …

5. Medical Billing Work at Home Scams

The pitch: The scammer claims there is a crisis in the health care system and you can make big money by starting a home business providing electronic billing services, accounts receivable and electronic insurance claim processing to medical professionals. For your investment of $2,000 to $8,000, you are promised software, training and technical support. Unfortunately, you are not promised any clients.

In a study, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has said “Few consumers who purchase a medical billing business opportunity are able to find clients, start a business and generate revenues - let alone recover their investment and earn a substantial income. Competition in the medical billing market is fierce and revolves around a number of large and well-established firms.”

6. Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)-Style Pyramid Scheme Scams

Typical Ad -- "Our products make it possible for people like you to earn more than they ever have in their lives! Soon you can let others earn money for you while you and your family relax and enjoy your affluent lifestyle! No experience necessary."
The pitch: You will make big money selling the products or services of a particular company.

Multi-level marketing, a direct sales system, is a well-established, legitimate form of business. Many people have successfully sold the products of reputable companies to their neighbors and co-workers. These people are independent distributors who sell popular products and also recruit other distributors to join them. The way MLM works is that as a distributor, you earn commissions both on your sales and on the sales of the people you recruit to become distributors.

On the other hand, illegitimate pyramid schemes can resemble these legitimate direct sales systems. An obvious difference is that the emphasis is on recruiting others to join the program, not on selling the product. For a time, new recruits who make the investment to buy product samples keep money coming into the system, but very few products are sold. Sooner or later the people on the bottom are stuck with a saturated market, and they cannot make money by selling products or recruiting. When the whole system collapses, only a few people at the top have made money—and those at the bottom have lost their investment.

The problem is that some MLM businesses are just pyramid schemes, frauds where the products and services only exist to make the opportunity look legitimate. The scam is that only the people at the top of the pyramid make money. Everyone else is just a bagholder.

More next post . . .

Online Work-at-Home Scams (Part 2)

As promised, here is the continuation of the detailed List of the Most Common Work-at-Home Scams on the Internet …

3. Craft Assembly

Typical Ad: "Send money for a start-up kit with all the materials you'll need, and earn money for every item you complete to our satisfaction."

The pitch: You will make good money working at home by making things which the company will then purchase from you.

Sounds great, but with few exceptions, the victim orders the kit, paying thousands of dollars for materials and equipment up front, does the work as instructed, and the product is rejected as “not up to standard” -- time after time. In fact, nothing the victim does to “improve” the product will make a difference, because the scammer doesn’t want the finished item, he or she wants the money for the kits... period.

4. Postal Forwarding

Aside from losing hard-earned money, this scam has caused people to have brushes with the law after falling for this scam. The scam has two variations:

a. Transportation of stolen goods

One man looking for home-based work because he had a disability that made a "brick and mortar” job difficult saw an ad for a job that required him to receive packages of electronics (MP3 players, video recorders, DVD players, etc.). He had to repackage them, and ship them to an address in a former Soviet republic. In exchange, the "hiring company" would reimburse him for shipping expenses, and pay him a fee for his services. The job sounded perfect, and since there was no up-front fee, he thought it was legitimate.

He followed the instructions he'd received, which included stated monetary values for the customs forms, and forwarded the packages to the overseas address, with an invoice for his expenses. Soon after, he received a check drawn on a non-US bank, and deposited it in his bank account.

Several days later, his bank notified him that the check was drawn on a non-existent account, and was worthless. Further, when he reported the scammers to the authorities, he learned that he had unwittingly been a key cog in an illegal machine.

As it turned out, the scammers had purchased the electronics with a stolen credit card, and used him to "launder" the transaction. To add insult to injury, in following the instructions for shipping he had made fraudulent statements on the customs forms

b. Cashing checks and forwarding money in exchange for a commission.

In this scam, the scam begins as an email in your Span folder. The scammer typically claims to need someone to help him process funds, because he lives in a country “where the government makes it difficult or impossible” for him to do so himself. Or he/she claims you are the relative of some high government official in a far Third World country who died in a plane crash or bomb blast.

To launch the scheme, he sends you a bank draft or cashier’s check, you deposit it into your bank account, and you wire the scammer 80% or so of the amount you deposited -- keeping the rest as a commission.

The sting comes when your bank notifies you that the “cashier’s check” you deposited was bogus or stolen, and that you’re personally responsible for the money that was wired abroad (often to obscure Third World countries).

More next post … see yah!

Online Work-at-Home Scams (Part 1)

Due to my previous bitter experience with being scammed, and in my sincere desire to help thousands of people avoid falling victim to scams and losing a lot of hard-earned money to scammers, I am going to present my material in four parts: Scams List, Signs of a Scam, Do’s and Don’ts in Online Job Search, If Victimized.

Typically, the profile of victims most susceptible to online “work-at-home” scams have not changed. Con artists off and on the Web have preyed most heavily upon senior citizens, the disabled, mothers who need to stay at home with their children, people with low income, people with few job skills, and people who just want to get rich quick. More recently, with the advent of the Internet, those who have been victimized by scammers now include people who want a change of career from working for others to working for themselves. The attraction of working in the comfort of one’s own home, with no boss looking over your shoulder, no bundy clock to beat, no irritating traffic to contend with, is simply too great that people often disregard the warning signs of a scam and plunge headfirst into the trap.

Details of the Most Common Work-at-Home Scams on the Internet

1. Stuffing Envelopes

Typical Ad -- "$350 Weekly Guaranteed! Work two hours daily at home stuffing envelopes."
When answering such ads, you get promotional material asking for cash just for details on money-making plans. These details usually turn out to be instructions on how to go into the business of placing the same kind of ad the advertiser ran in the first place. This activity requires spending several hundred dollars more for advertising, postage, envelopes, and printing. This system feeds on continuous recruitment of people to offer the same plan to scam others in turn.

The bottom line is this: there are machines that stuff envelopes, and no legitimate company is going to pay a human being to do something a machine can do in a fraction of the time, at less cost.

2. Typing and Data Entry

Typical Ad – “Work-at-Home Data Entry Typists Wanted. No experience necessary.”
The pitch: You will make money working at home doing data entry and word processing tasks. All you have to do to get started is send in a small fee.

While legitimate work-at-home data entry opportunities can be found online (most data entry work is outsourced to India and other low-labor-cost countries), you'll have to hack through cyber-forests of scams to get to them.

One version of the data entry scam claim you'll earn a certain amount for every "application" that you process. Similar to the envelope stuffing scam, you pay a fee and in return are instructed to run the same ad that you responded to, and to collect the “processing fees” from those who reply. The "applications" that you “process,” in other words, are from people like you, except now the role of scammer is yours.

Another version of the scam involves having the applicant pay a fee for software that he or she will "need" in order to complete the data entry jobs. Once you purchase the software, however, it becomes clear that you yourself will be responsible for finding the data entry work.
The later version of the scam requires a fee (from $30 to $99) to access the “members’ area” where you find a shallow discussion on work-at-home job hunting and a worthless list of companies who are allegedly hiring work-at-home data entry workers. Although there are legitimate companies included in the list, 95% of the list has been lifted from free directory listings on the Web or free government listings which you will be able to access anyway without spending a single cent. To add insult to injury, whenever you ask for assistance in finding work-at-home data entry jobs, you are simply provided links to other sites which are doubtful as to hiring. There is simply no or minimal customer support provided as promised in the original advertisement.

If a company needs some typing done, they're not going to advertise it on the internet where they're going to get 10,000 replies. They're going to hire an administrative assistant who can type a report and hand it to them- while greeting clients and answering the phones.
Companies often find a need for specialized skills that can be done by a freelancer on a contract basis. Some examples would be database work, research projects and seasonal billing needs. But the key is that they involve a specialized skill that their existing employees don't have.

Stay posted for the continuation of this List of Ten Most Common Scams on the Internet.

Falling Prey to Internet Scams

In my desperation to quickly find online data entry jobs, I fell victim to a lot of scams. I had plunged into job hunting without ever engaging in any form of decent research whatever. I was not prepared to discern what was legitimate and what was not. I was not even knowledgeable on the electronic payment methods of the internet. I just wanted a job fast! I was easily deceived by slick, well-designed sales pages and pitches. Since I was short on cash, I used my credit cards. That got me deeper and deeper in debt.

When eight weeks passed without any cent going into my wallet, I felt deep regret and remorse at being so naïve. I finally decided to do some serious research on the dangers related to my job search.

In my next post, I will expose all the scams you as an online jobseeker would ever encounter. I have also managed to compile lists of how avoid falling victim to Internet work-at-home scams and what to do if you do get scammed.

Internet Income

I just knew I could tap Internet income opportunities. Due to the dynamic nature of the Internet, I knew deep in my heart that there were thousands upon thousands of income-generating sources on the Web. The sweetest part of it all is that you can work at home, with no boss looking over your shoulder, no bundy clock to beat, no commuter traffic to wrestle with. You could set your own work hours and target outputs. The more productive you are, the more income you earn. You can devote quality time to your kids and have more than adequate income for your needs. In the Philippines, where the U.S. dollar-Philippine peso exchange rate currently hovers around $1:Php44, a monthly Internet income of $300 would go a long way towards alleviating my dire financial condition. It was a realistic and modest initial target I set for myself.

Actually, the original plan was to set up an Internet café, with borrowed capital of course. The idea played on my mind for a full two months. But Internet cafes are now a dime a dozen even in the Philippines. You could see one in every street corner and in between. Young entrepreneurs would set up a café with as little as five PC’s and a single commercial broadband connection. Worse, due to intense competition, Internet surfing rates in our city had plummeted to as low as $0.35 an hour. I talked with a very successful Internet service provider and café owner in our city. He told me that, in order for an Internet café to be feasible business-wise, you had to have at least ten PC’s. Given all these factors, I dropped the entire Internet café idea.

The next Internet income idea I pursued was work-at-home data entry jobs. Overseas companies are reportedly downsizing and outsourcing their data entry requirements so as to reduce operating costs. Hiring online data entry typists (who are technically contractors for any given job) is cheaper than maintaining regular employees on the payroll. Once you were hired, these companies supposedly sent you the data to be encoded through the Internet. You encoded the data into pre-programmed data entry screens which facilitated the upload of the data to a central database.

Here was an ideal work-at-home Internet job, or so I thought. The work was simple, easy, and downright mechanical. You had to be accurate though. You were supposedly to be paid on a per record basis through mailed check, PayPal, eGold, MoneyBookers or other payment method. Even if you were paid as low as $0.50 per record, if you were hardworking enough, you could earn a fairly substantial Internet income.