I’ve seen it before:
- Start paying thousands
- Easy work from home
- No experience required
- Earn $350 a day
Unfortunately, in the work-from-home niche, scams are everywhere. Some jobs from home scams are more obvious than others (and sometimes legitimate opportunities may sound like scams). It is difficult to eliminate the rightful opportunities from fraud that you need to keep away.
How do you avoid fraud?
Do your research and proceed with caution! Always read your company or organization to see if they have a reputable (or any) online presence. Find your company’s leadership profile on our website and cross-refer to information using LinkedIn profiles. Find contact information such as your company’s email address, phone number, and physical location. Scammers don’t want to find them, so they hide behind fake accounts, free email addresses and post office boxes.
Do not buy immediately. Before you dive in, discuss business opportunities with friends, spouses and others. Check out Better Business Bureau, GlassDoor.com, TrustPilot and other review sites to make sure no scams are taking you.
Get Rich-Quick’s offer is fascinating. Marketers are excellent at offering language as a fleeting opportunity, and encourage them to jump on the train before leaving the station. Pyramid schemes, cash fraud checks, and other opportunities argue that paying just a little in advance will bring great benefits with little work or effort. Unfortunately, it rarely rises.
Once someone explains a remote job opportunity, trust your gut first, then do your homework. With many scams, even educated, intelligent, and usually cautious people can smoke. Consider all the celebrities and CEOs who have fallen from Ponzi schemes and investment opportunities. Even a team of lawyers, managers and friends who looked at their backs, they were taken by con artists. It can happen at our best.
Take a step back when the company asks you to pay upfront or send money immediately. Yes, some business opportunities require initial investments, and legal work from home jobs requires applicants to pay for criminal history checks. However, the programmes taking part in your pay should always complement the alarm bell, especially if they seem to be untrue.
To help you decipher what is legal and what is not, here is a list of the most common jobs from home scams far away!
1. Assembly kit for money
One common task at home is the assembly kit. These kits are for toys, jewelry, electronics, circuit boards, or other products. These offers are appealing as creative outlets building something can be fun. Typically, participants are instructed to purchase a kit to create a product that is sold to the company.
Reviews on these kits reveal that they are often time consuming and labor intensive. Assembly kit time estimates are usually severely underestimated and there are few returns. Needless to say, in most cases, when you try to sell your finished product to a retailer, the finished product does not meet the quality requirements. Therefore, you will receive the money you paid for the kit. Rather than creating something that has no value or market value, why not express your creativity by selling handmade items on Etsy, which allows you to control price and value?
2. Car Wallup Ads
The opportunity to build a car is another fraudulent offer to be careful. Companies claim to pay you for advertising on your vehicle. The scammer may request a prepaid fee, committing to sending materials for packaging. They may also suggest complicated payment methods (such as sending a cashier’s check to pay the installer rather than simply paying the installer itself). These scams can turn into huge rifts.
There are some legitimate companies that pay you to promote in your car. These legitimate companies will do reviews online. They don’t ask you for advance payments, but they ask you questions about your driving habits. (If you’re not driving, who pays you to advertise your car?) Carvertise (with an A rating with the BBB) is a company that screens drivers and pays qualified advertisers. Always do research before participating.
3. Fake check scam
Checking cash scams is notorious and can change your life. Usually they look like legitimate work ads. Some of these scammers come as work at home companies and request identity, bank account information and other personal information, and set up as so-called employees. However, after the initial fishing is complete, the check cash con man will send the employee a genuine look check. Deposit your check and then return the cash or pay in advance for equipment, training or other services.
This is where scams raise the red flag! When these scammers have your personal information and money, they will disappear, clean up any mess of your deposits and make sure you pay fraudulent checks!
4. Envelope filling
When I was in college, I fell into a stuffed envelope scam. The flyer asked for $12 for information, but will probably learn how to pack an envelope while earning $2 per envelope! Well, it turns out that the whole “secret” has reprinted flyers and posted them on message boards, waiting for other unsuspecting job seekers to fall into scams. Hmm! No, thank you!
Today, these stuffing envelope scams are on the internet and remain the same concept (although they often want more than $12). Don’t fall on it! Envelope filling schemes are one of the oldest and most common jobs in home scams. The FTC and the Better Business Bureau have issued warnings about these scams.
5. Copy and paste the job
Jobs advertised as post positions or copy-and-paste jobs for links are scams. With a small startup fee, scammers claim they will make thousands of dollars by simply copying and pasting links online to categorized sites such as Craigslist. Perhaps people will make money when they click on the link, but in reality, the links they post are spam and are generally marked that way. So you never make money. Furthermore, this so-called job contributes to the overwhelming amount of garbage/spam already on the internet. Avoid copy and paste jobs – they never produce positive results.
6. Pyramid scheme
Pyramid schemes can often be disguised as multi-level marketing (MLM) opportunities, but don’t be fooled. Pyramid schemes rarely sell real products. Pyramid scheme participants are often required to pay the registration fee upfront. However, there are no actual products or services. With the Pyramid scheme, individuals earn money by registering more participants in the scheme rather than selling actual products.
In the pyramid scheme, the product is fake. There is no product to promote other than the program itself. Pyramid schemes are not only malicious and unsustainable. It’s illegal all over the world! Money goes straight to participants at the top of the pyramid, so most people lose their money and end up burning. Don’t fall on it!
7. Rebate Processing
Rebate processing is another task in a home scam that appears to be related to affiliate marketing. Typically, companies running this scam will ask you to pay a prepaid (red flag) to learn more about the “ways” to take advantage of this opportunity. Once you have paid, you will receive information on how to post related product ads and rebate offers on social media to sites such as Craigslist.
If someone clicks on an ad and buys related products, you get a committee cut (this is not usually because they post spam). Secondly, the ads you post include a rebate offer, so you will need to forward some of the fees to the buyer. This is a scam and isn’t worth your time!
8. Unsolicited job
Beware of unsolicited job offers, investments and purchase opportunities that someone is excited to offer you (but you didn’t request it). Many ripping, fraud and employment schemes are unsolicited. Before a scammer tells you about offers you cannot give, ask yourself, “Did you ask for this information?”
There are many forms of unsolicited job openings. Fake recruiters may contact you via email, social media, text or phone. Generally, unsolicited offers do not occur in person or in person, as scammers do not want to reveal their true identity.
The best way to avoid fraud through unsolicited job postings is to maintain a spreadsheet for the jobs you applied to. That way, once the job is received, you will know if you applied for the position or not. If you receive an unsolicited job, mark the email as spam and then delete the email. Unsolicited jobs are phishing scams, so we will never click on unknown links or disclose personal information or passwords. If you think your job posting is legal, you should be able to find a LinkedIn recruiter and verify your identity.
Finally, actual recruiters are not looking for entry-level workers. There are already enough people to fill these positions. They are looking for highly trained professionals, including healthcare, high-tech and energy experts.
9. Fake Job List
Using large job boards and sites in remote job searches can cause fake job postings to be displayed. With these scams, fraudsters pretend to be a legal company that needs remote workers. In many cases, these fake jobs are for high-paying entry-level roles such as data entry clerks. When you apply for these scammer jobs, the scammers usually request an interview via third-party messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, etc. During this so-called interview, they sometimes force personal information on you, such as your bank account number or social security number. They may also convince you to buy a gift card.
If you find a job on a major job board, we recommend that you check its legitimacy by finding your location on the company website or contacting someone at the company to make sure it’s not a home scam job.
What if I get scammed?
If you become a victim of fraud, please contact your bank or credit card company to stop payments. If you provide personal information like a password, please change it immediately so that scammers cannot take over your account. You also need to report the fraud to the Federal Trade Commission so that you can investigate the company in question. In some cases, depending on how quickly you act, you may be able to recover your losses, but in many cases, once the money is gone, it will go away forever. Therefore, it is always best to spend time studying remote work opportunities.
Avoid work with home scams
If you’re still worried about how to find a job with a home scam, check out FlexJobs. All the jobs listed on their website are hand drawn for legitimacy. When applying for work via FlexJobs, you can rest assured that you will not fall prey to work in home scams. FlexJobs not only has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, but also offers a money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied.
Luckily there are many great, legitimate ways to make money from home. Remember: if you don’t think that working opportunities at home are too good, that’s probably true. Go with caution, do your homework and beware of these common scams!
Originally published on July 18, 2017. The content was updated in July 2024.