When you decide you want to find a way to increase your income while working at home, there are a lot of scams you need to watch for. The top 10 home based business scams all seem to follow a similar pattern. Either they offer to pay you unreasonable amounts for poorly defined work or they charge you a great deal of money to get completely unreliable information you can never really use.
1. Craft Manufacturing – This old ruse involves convincing you to send the company money for your “starter kit” of parts and instructions. You put the craft together and send it back in for payment. At this point, you discover that your crafts weren’t “up to company standards” and you don’t get paid. Face it; Chinese workers will do the same job for pennies on the dollar. Why would anyone pay you more to do this work?
2. A List of Companies Searching for Workers – This scam involves you paying a small fee in order to supposedly access a list of companies looking to hire stay at home workers. You may actually get a list of companies, but they aren’t looking for home workers, if they ever did. You would do better just checking employment listings on your own.
3. 1- 900 Numbers – If we have to tell you never to call a 1-900 number, then you haven’t been paying attention to the news. When you call the number, you are paying a great deal to get supposedly useful information about home based jobs. The only one making money is the company you are calling – this is how they earn their income.
4. Email Processing – Do you have any idea what email processing is? No one does, because it isn’t a legitimate opportunity. You aren’t going to be paid to sit and read other people’s email. In essence, you will have paid to learn how to spam others in the same fashion in which you were taken in.
5. Envelope Stuffing – There was a time when this was a legitimate employment opportunity. Companies would hire individuals to do this kind of work as unskilled labor. Those days are long gone. It is another “chain letter” kind of scam that has no value and questionable morality.
6. Online Chain Letters – If you have e-mail, you will have seen at least a few of these letters. They offer an opportunity to make money quickly if only you send some money to the person above you on the list included in the email. This is actually a pyramid scheme and while it is possible that some fool down the line will send you money, it is also illegal.
7. MLM – Multi Level Marketing isn’t illegal, but it isn’t profitable either. At least not for most people involved. No matter what company you join, a great deal of your potential income will be dependent upon other people you have recruited to sell the same product. Worse, some MLM companies are actually pyramid schemes and can create legal headaches down the road.
8. Medical Billing – Yes, there are legitimate medical billing and transcription jobs that can be managed from home. You will work for a larger company, they will provide training, expect certain work hours and more. If a promotion is asking you to send in several hundreds of dollars to provide you with “everything you need” to set up your own company, run away!
9. Data Entry – Sorry folks, it doesn’t make any sense for a company to pay you to do their data entry. It is cheaper and more accurate to have an in-house division doing this work. Save your money and don’t send away for a list of companies looking for workers.
10. Online Businesses – There are plenty of legitimate online businesses, but there are also a great many scams. Any offer to turn your computer into a huge moneymaking machine is likely erroneous. The offer is likely to request money at its second level or turn out to be one of the scams listed above. Legitimate online businesses don’t get workers this way; workers find them independently and apply for jobs.