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Ten Tip-Offs to Work-At-Home Job Scams

© Leslie Truex

The Internet has created many new forms of work-at-home scams. Some are electronic forms of age-old scams. Others are brand new making use of the convenience and vastness of the Internet. The fact that millions of Americans spend billions of dollars every year on scams suggests that people have a difficult time deciphering the legitimate work-at-home opportunities from the schemes. The truth is, it will always be difficult to decipher scams. Con artists will continually change their ads to trick unsuspecting work-at-home wannabes. Here are ten tips that should make you suspicious about a job ad. Please note that these tips are for work-at-home job announcements only.

It may be a scam when:

1) The job ad asks for money. Clever ads try to hide the cost by saying its to determine if you are serious about the job or to process your application. The truth is legitimate employers never charge to hire you. If your boss asked for $25 to determine if you really want the job or to add you to payroll, you'd think he was nuts. Remember that work-at-home jobs are like any other job. Its skills and experience, not money that will get a work-at-home job.

2) The e-mail address is a free or commercial account. Commercial accounts are services such as AOL or MSN. Free email accounts are those provided by Yahoo and Hotmail. More often than not, job announcements using commercial or free email accounts are either home business opportunities or work-at-home schemes. They may or may not be scams but you can bet they aren't jobs. There are exceptions to this. I once found flextime job through my local classifieds in which the email was with AOL. However, this was a local company that I was able to research.

3) The website is hosted on a free site. This is similar to the idea above. Most "jobs" advertised using free website hosting such as Angelfire, Tripod, and Homestead are promoting business opportunities or schemes that are not likely to be jobs. It's my belief that if a company can't afford to host its site with a paid host provider, it can't afford to hire you.

4) You can't determine the nature of the job from the ad or web site. These ads are full of hype about income possibilities doing a job that requires little more than nothing. But they never tell you what the job actually involves. These ads are usually over-priced "systems" and other unproven schemes.

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