It isn’t that people are simple and credulous; people really are aware that work-at-home scams exist. It’s just that they mistakenly believe that they’ll be able to recognize such a thing when they see it. For instance, if they see an advertisement for a form-filling job where they promise to pay $5 for every form filled or an ad.
For an envelope stuffing job where they promise to pay $5000 a week (not a month) to have letters placed in envelopes and mailed, these people believe that they’ll know that it’s scammy. But the work at home scams are way ahead of them. Read on to see if you would catch out the following “offers”.
Consider jewelry making (or assembling toys); the offer can sound pretty amazing. They send you instructions and materials to make jewelry at home with. And they pay you generously for each piece that you make. Of course, you need to pay $500 for the materials and instructions.
Thousands of people buy to this scheme; largely because the two or three legitimate jewelry-making work-at-home businesses there are lend legitimacy to the whole business. Usually, when you make jewelry and send it in, they just criticize your workmanship and reject everything.
If you’re about to apply to work at home program, should really check it out with the Better Business Bureau first to see if there are any complaints against it. You could also call your local consumer affairs agency to see if there are any pending complaints. For real work at home businesses, you should probably check out the FTC’s website at ftc.gov/bizopps.
But here are a few more work at home scams that lots of people have had trouble catching out. How about being a money mule? Sound interesting? Here’s the thing: in the US, you can bring a check to a bank and you can withdraw the money right away even before the bank collects on the check.
Few other countries offer this convenience, and fraudsters from other countries know this. Your job, they tell you, is to simply take delivery of the checks they send you, cash them at your bank, and then wire the money wherever they tell you (to them in another country, usually).
Of course, the bank realizes that the check is worthless in a couple of days and they come down on you. Needless to stay, this scam doesn’t last very long. But they fraudsters have already made a couple thousand dollars off you.
There are other very imaginative work at home scams too. How about the medical billing scam? This is where they say that there are thousands doctors in your state who are too busy to do their own insurance paperwork, who’ll hire you if you know how to do their work; sign up with this company and they’ll give you the training you need to apply to doctors in your area, they say.
Needless to say, there is no such thing as doing insurance work for doctors, and you’re out a couple of hundred dollars paying for their nonexistent training.
There’s one thing that’s pretty clear in all of these work at home scams. Any system that asks you to pay upfront should appear pretty doubtful.
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