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!