There’s a big difference between a work-at-home scam and a legitimate business opportunity that enables you work from a home office, using it as your primary base of operations. Unfortunately, the number of phony schemes that would easily fall under the former heading is growing exponentially, largely due to the fact that millions more people than ever before can be reached affordably and all too easily online and via email.
Add to that the fact that the sluggish economic recovery has yet to reach everyone, and it’s all too simple for today’s highly evolved con artists to target the most vulnerable among us with bogus claims that anyone can make thousands of dollars a month for doing next to nothing. But where there’s lots of gain and very little pain in business, there is almost always a scam, pure and simple.
While avoiding any business opportunity, distributorship, licensee opportunity or franchise that promises you lots of profits for very little effort is a good rule of thumb, there are a number of work-at-home schemes that should also raise red flags for the fact that they rarely if ever pan out.
In other words, these are some of the most notorious and phony work-at-home come-ons of our time, so watch out and do your homework before you jump in:
• Envelope stuffing
• Craft/product assembly
• Rebate processing
• Online Internet search engine management or research
• Medical billing
• Data entry jobs
• Claims processing
• Certain online businesses
• Multi-level marketing companies where no actual product or service is sold, but profits are generated solely as a result of your recruitment of others
• Posting ads
• E-commerce where you passively receive a slice of profit for every item sold on a website
• Check cashing
• Re-shipping/packaging of products
• Pyramid schemes where early sellers of a worthless product or service take a cut of all that is sold by those that follow
• Contract typing where you pay for a lead list of potential clients
• Name and address collection services
• Mystery shopper.