Avoiding Home Business Scams

If you’ve been considering taking on a home based business you have to know a huge portion of them are scams. Honestly, if it were so easy to fork over a few bucks, to make thousands, we would all be envelope stuffing millionaires. Maybe thousandaires would be more accurate? Below is a summary of some of the biggest scams out there, how to recognize them, and how to avoid them.

First off, where did you find this work from home offer? Worst of all, did it find you? If you received unsolicited email, letter or found a number that doesn’t reach a real person then I would do some research first. If you saw an ad in a newspaper, a job magazine or on a job website, then it’s more likely to be legitimate but guaranteed. Remember, these companies are in the business of advertising, not verifying legitimate businesses.

Envelope Stuffing: This is one of the most established work from home scams. The way it works is once you pay your money and sign up to work from home, you are sent a set of envelopes and ads just like the one you responded to. Then you stuff your envelopes and pay to send them out. You could make some money if someone responds to your ad but the chances are slim. Don’t waste your money on this one.

Home Assemblers Wanted: Charging for supplies is hard to pin down to any one scam it’s the way almost all work at home scams work. First you will be asked invest in the materials needed to do the work and then you will be sent very cheap materials that aren’t worth anything like what you paid for them. Once the product is assembled you’ll find that there’s no one who will buy it.

Quick tip: If anyone asks for money up front run away fast. A real company should be willing to deduct any ‘fees’ from your first paycheck. If they won’t do that for you, then that’s because they don’t ever plan to pay you.

A variation on the scam common with crafts is that you might be asked to work at home making clothes, ornaments or toys. Everything seems legitimate you’ve got the materials without paying out any money, and you’re doing the work. Unfortunately for you, when you send the work back, the company will tell you that it didn’t meet their ‘quality standards’, and will refuse to pay you. Never do craft work from home unless you’re selling the items yourself.

Home Typing & Medical Billing: There are lots of work from home scams that will lead you to believe that they have more work than they can handle so they need people to work from home. What will happen? You will be told that you would be typing documents, or entering medical bills into a computer. These scams have one thing in common. They say all you need is your computer and then all you have to do is buy their special software to do the job.

This software might appear to be from a completely unrelated company, but don’t be fooled. The whole reason the work from home ad was there to begin with was a sneaky way to sell you their software.

Online Businesses: Here is the part where I piss off a lot of my fellow online marketers. To start, I want to get something clear. There are a ton of legitimate online businesses available. In fact I got my start in real estate by buying as many ebooks and online memberships I could afford. I later found out that most of the information in these ebooks where available for free if you were willing to do the research.

Nobody wakes up with a magic potion one morning on how to make money online and writes an ebook. Someone, somewhere at sometime before has more than likely already developed or used similar information. Given there are a few exceptions to this rule and occasionally there is something unique that becomes available. For the most part however, it’s just one person compiling their education and re-educating from their own perspective. I think most information online is worth paying for if you want the convenience of having the info collected and sorted into an easy to read format.

I have made a great deal of money resulting from information I’ve purchased online, but I have also purchased a lot of garbage as well. I will not endorse or sell any product that I have not personally tried, gained valuable knowledge from or had any type of success from. That is not the case for a lot of internet marketers. Most sell whatever pays the bills. If you want to be successful in business, long term, DO NOT MISLEAD PEOPLE! If you don’t believe in the product, don’t sell it. I promise that if you are in the business of selling other peoples garbage, you’ll make your small fortune, but it will be short lived.

Anyway, the point! Spend your money wisely. Use your money to educate yourself and I promise you won’t be sorry. Ebooks can be found anywhere online on virtually any subject. If you’re an internet marketing newbie, there is plenty of free information online. Try to stay clear of companies that are willing to give you a website for a monthly fee or paying excessive subscription fees to a website that doesn’t guarantee your results in writing.

Watch out for these!

• This package is worth over $2979 or whatever, but I’m giving it to you for $15. Give me a break already.
• Any website that doesn’t provide a phone number or at the very least a live customer service chat. Email alone shouldn’t be sufficient for a “company” charging for a valuable service.
• Any company or service that requires a bank transfer or western union.
• I highly recommend staying away from any “business opportunities” on places like craigslist. This is a place where scammers lurk and is not monitored in any way.
• If they don’t exist, keep moving! Listen I can find my grandmother on google these days, so if they’re doing business as ABC corp. and you can’ t find them online, something’s fishy.
• “Wholesale Distributors” – This is the one that burns me the most. Companies claiming to be selling wholesale and are charging a markup of 80 percent aren’t wholesalers. I fell for this one more than a couple of times when I first started online.

Well even though I could go on for days, this post is getting pretty long.

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