Don’t Be a Victim of Scam If In a Jam

Last year I took a few more steps to becoming self-employed. I signed up to a few different online business programmes, which I thought would help me to work from home and earn money.

In all, before I found the right opportunity for me, I spent just short of £200 on cheap introductory online business schemes, which were leaders into more expensive back end product lines. This might not seem much, but at the time I was on welfare benefits for a few months after a car accident. I had no savings nor any partner’s earnings to lean on.

I knew I had to find another option for earning money; because of my injuries, I wasn’t sure I would be able to return to a physically demanding job that I had only been in a few days, after quitting a well paid management job, which had been slowly killing me. I was in a mess physically and financially.

Even a couple of hundred pounds can be the difference in putting food on the table or paying the phone bill and can come at a cost to your peace of mind. They were difficult days and I got my fingers burnt investigating opportunities and options.

Many work at home scams, rely on their adverts containing a grain of truth and depend on the naivety and vulnerability of people to believe what are at best only partial truth and at worst completely false claims. A spokesperson for the attorney general of Minnesota, Ben Wogsland was reported as citing the state’s highest unemployment rate in 25 years, which makes “so many people who are desperate, who are vulnerable.”

Suffice to say, my money went nowhere as even those front end products did not engender enough trust for me to want to spend any more money with them. My message to you is to beware of claims of “Get Rich Fast” , “Make Money Now” or “Better Faster”. The online business world is still prone to hype and scams, in spite of recent attempts by Google and the Federal Trade Commission to clean it up.

We haven’t seen the last of work at home scams yet. You may be attracted by offers which seem cheap or easy, but the devil is always in the detail. Buried in the “terms and conditions” may be small print allowing scammers to tap into your bank account.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently been applying pressure to rid the net of Get Rich Quick scams. Google have been cleaning up their pages and YouTube videos, making even legitimate online businesses raise the bar in terms of how they sell their products. Whilst some businesses have lost previous advertising campaigns as a result, it’s all good.

Fortunately, we are now seeing a decline in misrepresentation of business opportunities. But you need to check out what is involved with those offering you the chance to earn working from home. Perhaps you can only make money by recruiting other people to participate. This is known as a “pyramid scheme”; these are ILLEGAL.

This compares with legitimate direct sales or direct marketing for instance, where recruits earnings depend on sales as well as ‘residual income’ from their team.

If an advertisement makes an offer sounding ridiculously easy, it’s probably too good to be true. Similarly an online ad may only talk about your pipe dreams without telling you what kind of work you will do — other than it’s lucrative — this too can be a bad sign. Look for a contact number to ask about what is involved in this instance. If you cannot access a member of staff to talk to, do you really want to hand over any money?

Whilst you shouldn’t have to pay for information about a legitimate job, you may have to pay for training. You can always contact the Better Business Bureau or Office of Fair trading in the UK, or similar agency in other countries to see if there have been any other people making complaints about the “work at home” company you are looking into.

Watch out for apparently credible claims in scam email advertisements containing phrases such as “as seen on…” with logos of news organizations, such as ABC-TV or claiming affiliation to national institutions or corporations. Some scams show what look like legitimate business newspaper stories which endorse their product. Ask yourself if you are familiar with the named media, if not, you need to check them out.

To stay on the right side of the law, some ads contain lines like, “We are not a partner, affiliate, or licensee of (a large company) nor is our company in any other way formally associated with it.” However, the rest of the ad copy may seem to align themselves with legitimate online businesses.

Also, the word “advertisement” should appear somewhere on the page; this guarantees a certain standard of truth. If you see an ad which is suspect, report it to the relevant authorities.

Terms and conditions in ads can be very long, difficult to understand and skewed to benefit the company. It may say, for example, that in the event of a dispute, you can never sue the company; or in some cases, the company can sue you. Look out for continuing monthly charges, not just the shipping charge for the “free” kit. I got stung by such a scheme to the tune of over fifty pounds with one company and twenty with another!

Perhaps the most convincing of advertisements are those in an email which claim to be warnings of all other scams out there. Shockingly, they can be guilty of the very same work at home scams but lull you into a false sense of security by attacking others!

Finally, check amongst contact details for whether the work at home opportunity is with an off-shore company; if so, they may not be obliged to comply with regulations, meaning you are not protected. If there are no contact details available, steer clear.

Take a particular favourite scam of online business opportunities which features an ad of the good looking young man in jeans stretched out on a deck, one hand behind his head and the other resting on his chest. Next to him is his laptop, he’s apparently taking a snooze break from. The idyllic lifestyle is topped with the headline: “Work from home. Never set an alarm clock again. Make a fortune while being your own boss”. The ad contains the famous Google logo and makes income claims of “Earn up to $250 to $943 per day using Google.” (Anyone recognise ‘Google Fortune’?; there are other similar ones).

Google clamped down. The Federal Trade Commission earlier in 2009 sued a company calling itself ‘Google Money Tree’, which it said “conned consumers who are struggling to make a living and pay their bills during these difficult economic times” by claiming it was affiliated with Google.

Earning big money for simple and easy work from home, (that incidentally, requires your prior payment for a manual on how to do it) just is not common sense: “If that was true, we’d all be doing it”, is something I find myself saying to potential prospects to a legitimate opportunity I have since discovered since learning from having my fingers burnt with both scammers and also legitimate online business opportunities who simply lacked the integrity to tell the whole truth.

There are legitimate opportunities to work from home for a relatively small start up fees. A good example is the burgeoning secret shopper businesses, which women in particular find convenient to balance with other part time jobs and their home and family.

Of course, variations on secret shopper scams are also on the increase. For instance, if an offer is to “test shop” a money-transfer company, involving depositing a company check, this should ring alarm bells. It goes something like, you deposit a check into your own bank account and then wire some of your own money through e.g. Western Union. Low and behold, it later turns out to be worthless and you feel foolish to have been taken in.

Making anything upwards of about $15 per assignment is what you can generally expect as a mystery shopper. It tends to supplement other household earnings, unless you work it full time. This is work you can enjoy! It’s fun pretending to be someone else and being able to do it between other errands, so it doesn’t take too much of your time. The extra money funds your treats. “Kerching!”

The legitimate home based business home shopping sector is providing real benefits to people who can either only work part time or perhaps have disabilities, have retired or are students, i.e. people in circumstances which can make it difficult for them to find traditional work. This is a great legitimate opportunity to earn additional money I found for my own country…