Work-at-Home Scams

There are many different types of this scam. AMONG them:

From the BBB (see alert, below):

• ASSEMBLY WORK AT-HOME: Typical Ad -- "Assembly work at home! Easy money assembling craft items. No experience necessary."

  This scheme requires you to invest hundreds of dollars in instructions and materials and many hours of your time to produce items such as baby booties, toy clowns, and plastic signs for a company that has promised to buy them. Once you have purchased the supplies and have done the work, the company often decides not to pay you because your work does not meet certain "standards."

   

• CHAIN LETTER: Typical Ad -- "Make copies of this letter and send them to people whose names we will provide. All you have to do is send us ten dollars for our mailing list and labels. Look at the chart below and see how you will automatically receive thousands in cash return!!!"

  The only people who benefit from chain letters are the mysterious few at the top of the chain who constantly change names, addresses, and post office boxes. They may attempt to intimidate you by threatening bad luck, or try to impress you by describing themselves as successful professionals who know all about non-existent sections of alleged legal codes.

   

• ENVELOPE STUFFING: Typical Ad -- "$350 Weekly Guaranteed! Work two hours daily at home stuffing envelopes."

  When answering such ads, you may not receive the expected envelopes for stuffing, but instead get promotional material asking for cash just for details on money-making plans. The details usually turn out to be instructions on how to go into the business of placing the same kind of ad the advertiser ran in the first place. Pursuing the envelope ad plan may require spending several hundred dollars more for advertising, postage, envelopes, and printing. This system feeds on continuous recruitment of people to offer the same plan. There are several variations on this type of scheme, all of which require the customer to spend money on advertising and materials. According to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, "In practically all businesses, envelope stuffing has become a highly mechanized operation using sophisticated mass mailing techniques and equipment which eliminates any profit potential for an individual doing this type of work-at-home. The Inspection Service knows of no work-at-home promotion that ever produces income as alleged."

   

• MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING: Typical Ad -- "Our products make it possible for people like you to earn more than they ever have in their lives! Soon you can let others earn money for you while you and your family relax and enjoy your affluent lifestyle! No experience necessary."

  Multi-level marketing, a direct sales system, is a well-established, legitimate form of business. Many people have successfully sold the products of reputable companies to their neighbors and co-workers. These people are independent distributors who sell popular products and also recruit other distributors to join them.

  On the other hand, illegitimate pyramid schemes can resemble these legitimate direct sales systems. An obvious difference is that the emphasis is on recruiting others to join the program, not on selling the product. For a time, new recruits who make the investment to buy product samples keep money coming into the system, but very few products are sold. Sooner or later the people on the bottom are stuck with a saturated market, and they cannot make money by selling products or recruiting. When the whole system collapses, only a few people at the top have made money—and those at the bottom have lost their investment.

  [My highlight -BS]

  Please be aware that MLM (Multi-Level Marketing IS legitimate. It's just that you have to be VERY careful about the people with whom you will be doing business.
   

• ONLINE BUSINESS: Typical Ad -- "Turn your Home Computer into a Cash Machine! Get computer diskette FREE! Huge Selection of Jobs! No experience needed! Start earning money in days! Many companies want to expand, but don’t want to pay for office space. You save them money by working in the comfort of your home."

  This is typical of advertisements showing up uninvited in your e-mail—an old scheme advertised in a new way. You pay for a useless guide to work-at-home jobs—a mixture of computer-related work such as word processing or data entry and the same old envelope-stuffing and home crafts scams. The computer disk is as worthless as the guidebook. It may only list free government web sites and/or business opportunities which require more money.

   

• PROCESSING MEDICAL INSURANCE CLAIMS: Typical Ad -- "You can earn from $800 to $1000 weekly processing insurance claims on your home computer for health care professionals such as doctors, dentists chiropractors, and podiatrists. Over 80% of providers need your services. Learn how in one day!"

  Generally, the promoter of this scheme attracts you by advertising on cable television and, perhaps, by inviting you to a business opportunity trade show at a hotel or convention center. You may be:

  • Urged to buy software programs and even computers at exorbitant prices; a program selling at a software store for $69 might cost you several thousands of dollars.
  • Told that your work will be coordinated with insurance companies by a central computer.
  • Required to pay for expensive training sessions available at a "current special rate" that will be higher in the future, and
  • Pressured to make a decision immediately.

  Most likely, the expensive training sessions are superficial, and the market for your services is very small or nonexistent. The promoter may delay the processing of your job, citing a backlog or mistakes in your work. There may also be no central computer as advertised. You may be left with no way to deliver what you have promised to your clients or customers—if you found any—and with no way to earn any money on you own.

Others:

• PROCESSING BANK TRANSACTIONS FOR OVERSEAS BUSINESSES - aka Money Transfer: Typical Ad -- "All you need to do is receive payments (checks or money-orders) from our clients in the states, get them cashed at a bank or a quick cash spot, deduct your commission (10%), and forward the balance to us via Western Union money transfer."

  This sounds like the perfect job, right? Money for nothing. This is just another version of the Nigerian Scam.

  You will receive valid-looking checks and/or money orders, HOWEVER, they will have been:

  • written on stolen checks or money-orders (forged);
  • written on accounts the purveyors opened - for this purpose only - with assumed names, for minimal cash
  • written on modified checks or money orders (actual amount was $50.00, but now reads "$500.00);
  • written on old checks or money orders, on non-existent banks or services

  The amounts will be small enough not to raise alarms at the bank. You will cash the check, deduct your share (based on the agreed-upon "commission"), send the money to them through Western Union, and then the checks or money orders will "bounce", leaving you responsible for the written items and amounts in question.

  [My description -wds]

   

• RESHIPPING: Typical Ad -- "SHIPPING: Maintain shipping records, files and status reports; maintain in-house distribution of shipping documentation; may prepare and maintain shipping and packaging procedures, as well as inventory of packing and packaging material under supervision; develop and maintain tariff files and rate sheets as required; route shipments to appropriate destinations. RECEIVING: Receive materials/packages from [us]; unpack and examine incoming shipments, reject damaged items, record shortages and correspond with shipper to rectify damages and shortages; examine articles for defects and sort articles according to extent of defect; attach identification data onto article; record factors causing goods to be returned; unload and unpack incoming shipments; maintain required inspection records and documentation; enforce strict compliance with safety, handling and safeguarding of all documents and products to prevent loss or damage."

  Another easy job, right? Never leave home -Just open, inspect, repack, and send items from larger packages; and keep records.

  HOWEVER:

  • The items have been purchased using stolen checks or credit-cards, or they've been stolen, outright;
  • "[M]any companies will not send merchandise to Nigeria or Eastern Europe due to warnings about stolen credit card purchases, the scammer must find an in-country person to receive then reship the goods" [source: Suckers Wanted: "Universe" Logistics]
  • once the first shipment has arrived, you may be inundated with packages, because the "bad guys" know they only have a short time before you either figure out it's a scam, or realize how much time it will take to do it and want out;

  Apparently, once you know it's a scam, report it, and stop repacking and sending the packages, depending on the company, the size and/or number of packages, and policies, you may be asked NOT return the packages (the companies simply write the losses off). This leaves YOU with a storage nightmare, since you have nowhere to ship the items. You may be left to take the packages to the police department or post office for attention of the US Postal Inspector, yourself.

  [My description, except where noted -wds]

   

• SURVEY: Typical Ad -- "Get a FREE WII, just for taking our survey", "You have been selected to receive a free flat-screen, HD TV", "$500 Gift Card from Wal-Mart", "Earn $2000 a month just taking surveys", etc.

  While not essentially a work-at-home scam, they are offering products or money for free for your time. And the offers are usually so high, it's the same as work-at-home scams.

  Either through spam emails, through a phone call, through an ad in the newspaper or a magazine, through a pop-up on a site, or the actual landing page of a survey site, you are offered something for simply taking a survey.

  Sounds great! A FREE Wii, X-Box, Flat-Screen, money, car, whatever... JUST for taking a survey! Well, be VERY WARY about this.

  While there are legitimate companies that will give you incentives for taking surveys, just as there are legitimate companies offering work-at-home situations, scammers have found surveys an easy way to get personal information (Demographic information by illegitimate sites can be used to steal your identity, if they get too much - and it will sound like a legitimate question).

  Please note: It's extremely doubtful that you will receive anything expensive for a single survey. Even the two legitimate survey companies with which I do occasional surveys only offer points which can be redeemed for sweepstakes entries for nice prizes (such as those offered above), or for "folio items", such as those offered at businesses as incentives. (For a certain number of points, you can get a CD, a decorative item, or more, but it takes a LOT of points to get items as expensive as the items shown above - Think of the old "Green Stamps" items, here.)

  What will happen in reality?

  1. You will receive "points" or whatever they are calling it, and after a certain amount is reached, you will, may or MAY NOT receive the promised item.
  2. No matter how many surveys to take, you receive NOTHING but a blizzard of spam. Yep... They got your demographics and email address, and sold it! AND, you MAY not even have taken a single survey!
  3. If some of the "demographics" include your bank, your social security or driver's license number, or other personal information, you will could have your identity or more stolen.
  4. If they offer you a list of survey sites for money, the site-list will most-likely be well out of date, if you get it at all. Don't forget that if you pay by anything online, they now have your bank or credit-card info.

  Scammers are also sending out spoofed emails (those that LOOK like they come from legitimate sites), asking you to take customer service or "satisfaction" surveys. PLEASE be sure to check the link without clicking on it. (Roll the cursor over it and see what it says in the status bar at the bottom of the window. If the link shown is NOT the site of the company, if it's not the same as the link shown in the email, if it contains anything other than the domain, BE CAREFUL. Some of that stuff NOT the domain (usually following a question mark ["?"]) is 1) affiliate information (the people who will get paid for sending you to the others' sites) and, probably, your email address or id in their system. With the latter, if nothing else, they now know your email address is real, and working. They can sell it to spammers.

  And BE AWARE that most legit sites will NOT send emails asking you to take a survey.

  Do some online research. Enter the name of the company, the word "Survey" (if it's not in the name), and "scam", "fraud", "rip-off", or similar terms into your search engine, and see what they say.

  BTW: For more information on this type of "work-at-home" scam, simply perform an internet search for survey scam (or click it, here.)

NOTE: Scammers are always looking for new ways to take your money or get you to do their work for them. Read all of the above, read the information about other scams on my Scams Home page and it's links, and watch for similarities in emails that MAY interest you. You might be surprised how many scams (many of these type) that you, yourself, can find out there in "Internet-land"!