How to Avoid Work-at-Home Scams

Hundreds of people fall for work-at-home scams everyday. These are hard working folks who are just trying to get ahead in life, but fall for something that quite often is too good to be true. However, with a little bit of foresight and some online research, you can easily avoid falling prey to one of the great many work-at-home scams floating around out there.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Identify the work-at-home scam. There are literally tons of websites on the Internet dedicated just to informing you about the great many work-at-home scams out there. Do yourself a favor and spend plenty of time reading about these scams before you apply for any position.

2. Research the work-at-home opportunity. Anything that requires you to process money orders or your use your own checking account is a scam. Any company trying to charge you a fee that they promise to later reimburse is also a scam. Anyone trying to sell you their success kit with high promises of making big dollars is only making big dollars because suckers buy their fake kit. Read the fine print--they even say that you won't make a lot of money using their system.

3. Check with federal agencies to determine the opportunity is legal. Federal agencies such as the FBI always have a list of current online work-at-home scams posted to their web site. Take a few minutes to review these so you know what to steer clear of.

4. Never pay a fee of any kind, ever. No legitimate company will ever charge you a fee to start working for them. This is the surest sign of a scam. Think about it, why should you pay to do work for them so they can pay you?

Tips & Warnings

• Remember, no legitimate company will ever try to charge you to work for them.
• If it sounds too good to be true, it most often is.

Resources

• Work-at-home scam information
• Additional work from home scam info.

[christamiller]

on 9/28/2009 Excellent, excellent advice. I wrote a similar article on avoiding get rich quick schemes, so I dig the theme.