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Avoiding Internet Work-At-Home Scams

© Leslie Truex

"Dear Leslie,I keep seeing all sorts of ads for "home mailing programs" and "get paid to process e-mail" that claim to pay $100's of dollars per week. Are these for real? Are there companies that will pay you to do their mailings or process their e-mail?Signed: Desperate to Work At Home"

I receive e-mails like this every day. Before the internet, these scams were envelope stuffing schemes, chain letters, and ads for assembly work. While these scams often burned people, once they learned about these scams, it was easy to avoid them. However, the growth of the internet has created many new opportunities for scams and the traditional scams have been renamed making them more difficult to decipher. Chain letters or pyramid schemes are now called "gifting programs". Envelope stuffing is now called "home mailing" or "e-mail processing". But no matter what they are called, they are still scams and many are illegal.

It is an unfortunate fact that unscrupulous or desperate people are willing to take advantage of other people's dream of working at home. They perpetuate ineffective and often illegal schemes. I have yet to meet anyone making money in envelope stuffing, e-mail processing, or any of the other schemes being promoted online. I have gotten several e-mails recently that say the sender and his partner made $47,000 in one month doing what, I am not sure. I visited one sender's web site and found it was on a free hosting site, his address was a Yahoo account, and his web site had code errors. You would think someone making $47,000 per month could afford a domain name with email, and would pay someone to make sure his site was free of errors.

If you are looking for a work-at-home job, you must do the same things you would do for a traditional job search. You would not pay your local businesses to hire you so you should not pay for a telecommuting position. You would not perpetuate a fraud for a local business so you should not for a telecommuting job.

Here are some tips to help you avoid scams as you search for legitimate work:

1. The first tip-off that a "job" is not a "job" is that it asks you to pay a fee. Some companies call it a processing fee. Others indicate it is to cover their costs or it is to measure your level of seriousness for the job. No matter what the fee is for, you can bet, it is not for a job. Legitimate employers do not charge to read your resume or set you up on payroll. They do not charge you for their time in interviewing you or giving you information about the job. In addition, most recognize that if you are taking the time to apply, you are serious about the job. If you do not get anything else out of this article, get this: Legitimate employers NEVER charge to hire you.

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