Top Work at Home Scams

While it’s completely possible to make a full time income online scammers have taken advantage of this by trying to get people to take the easy way out. Promises of earning hundreds of dollars a day with no experience can easily suck people in (and subsequently suck the money out of their pockets!)

I think the internet is a great place to earn money. It’s worked out really well for me as I live in a small town and would not be able to earn the money I’m earning if I worked locally. Plus, when freelancing or starting your own home based business, college degrees aren’t typically needed, making it once again a good option for those (like me) with skills but no degree.

The legit ways to earn money online take hard work and patience. If you want to get started earning money online here’s what you need to watch out for!

How to Identify a Work From Home Scam

If it’s too good to be true well, then it’s too good to true.

• You shouldn’t have to pay any money upfront to get a job.
• Get rich quick schemes are just that, schemes.
• Anything promising to pay you hundreds of dollars a day with no experience needed and in only a couple hours of time is a flat out lie.
• If the work is so easy that everyone could be doing it and make a good living at it then everyone would be doing it.

The truth is that it’s entirely possible to make a good living online – it just won’t happen fast. Earning money through the internet takes time and just like everyone before you who’s been able to successfully make a living online you have to start from the bottom and work your way up.

With that said these are the top work at home scams you need to watch out for.

Posting Ads Online

Posting ads online is one of the most popular work from home scams I’ve seen. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads “Make $500 a day with only two hours of work!” But that’s not really how it goes….

While you think you’re posting ads for businesses it doesn’t work like that, instead it’s a chain scheme.

Here’s how it usually works:

• You sign up with a company and pay a fee (Normally ranging anywhere from $25-$99)
• After signing up you then go around spamming Facebook pages, blogs, comments sections, and social media telling people how they can make money posting ads.
• If someone signs up under you get a cut of their fee and then they have to go around spamming people in order to make money.

There’s no legit businesses involved in these type of schemes and there’s no products. You can read a more in depth post on how this works here.

Stuffing Envelopes

Stuffing envelopes is an age old work from home scheme. I can remember reading about this “work from home opportunity” ten years ago in the classifieds section of the newspaper.

This scam works just like posting ads online, it’s a chain type thing.

You pay to become an “envelope stuffer” and then you send out letters to people telling them how they can make money stuffing envelopes.

We’ve got machines that can stuff envelopes much more efficiently and for a much lower price than a human being could do this.

Email Processing

At this point these work from home scams all seem to have one thing in common and the email processing job follows suite – it’s a chain scam.

You pay someone a fee to give you instructions on making money processing emails and then you are instructed on how to tell other people to make money processing emails. There’s nothing legit to it!

The only program I’ve found where you can actually make money “reading” emails (just viewing advertisements) is Inbox Dollars. While I love and use InboxDollars reading emails isn’t going to earn you a good income seeing as you only get paid $0.02 for every email you read.

If you’re promised to make hundreds of dollars a day (or heck, even $10) it’s a scam. Period.

At Home Assembly Worker

The at home assembly work is something a couple of my friends tried after we graduated high school. They saw an ad in the newspaper, paid the fee, got their kit to make some type of beaded jewelry, and then……….nothing.

From my research it appears that the at home assembly jobs go like this:

• You pay for your kit. (Normally putting together some type of craft, usually involving beads.)
• You receive your kit and instructions.
• You send back in your creations.
• Your assembled creations will never meet the quality guidelines.
• You eventually realize that this is a scam and complete waste of your time.

Again, it really doesn’t seem to make sense for companies to outsource a task like this to at home workers.

Stay Away From Easy, Get Rich Quick Schemes

If you want to make a living online you certainly can do it. Unfortunately, any works that’s easy, promises hundreds of dollars a day, and charges a fee to start is a scam. Instead find some legit ideas you really like and start working hard toward them.

Have you ever ran into an online money making scam?