Work At Home Online Scams – ABC 20/20 Report on How to Avoid Being Scammed for Work At Home Jobs

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ABC’s John Stossel recently reported on all the online scams related to work from home. It was in collaboration with the Better Business Bureau & Christine Durst of Staff Centrix.

The point behind the interview analysis & the case studies were to show how the scammers run their online work-from-home businesses scams.

Chris runs her organization identifying the scamming companies & often helping unsuspecting job seekers fall prey to the tempting offers like Make 3000 Dollars in A Week with No Experience!

John & Chris looks into the online ads for work at home business, like stuffing envelopes to make $800 a week. They all advertise for their beginners kit for less than $50 & promises to make you anything from $300 to $800 a week, with no prior experience.

Chris estimates that such fake websites are often run by individual scammers & often in international rings. Each receive over a million hits a month & Chris believes that the scammers make over a few million dollars a year from innocent job seekers trying to make quick money.

John Stossel & Chris suggest a few ways to either identify such scammers:

• the phrase “work from home” is used as a bait on search engines. If you are looking for work-at-home opportunities, prefer not to search in Google or any other search engines for “Work at home”
• avoid any job or opportunity that promises big money in a short time
• avoid ads for jobs or work-from-home opportunities that ask for no experience but sure success
• avoid ads for jobs that ask for a “kit to get started” – in most of the cases that John & Chris investigated for abc.com, that “kit” never arrived
• avoid ads that pictorially depicts big success – big mansions, yachts, fancy cars etc
• avoid companies that shows the same person in the ads in different websites but conveying the same messages
• look for contact name, telephone numbers or email contacts. Write to them or speak to them before you get started. Most scamming websites do not have any contact address, or never return phone calls or emails to avoid being tracked

Always research the opportunities before you invest even a dollar. Ask a friend or as for references, try to establish contact with the company through email or phone.

And last of all, check with BBB to see if anyone has filed any complaints & the BBB rating for that company. This is a less effective means since most of the time these online scammers keep changing their names & registrations & are often not listed with BBB.