Five Work From Home Internet Scams To Avoid

With the economy continuing to decline, more and more people are being taken by work from home internet scams. It is sad to see, since the people who are the most vulnerable seem to be hit the hardest, and hopefully this post will help you avoid being taken. 

Online Data Entry Jobs

This is a very common work at home scam you'll see advertised out there. The sales page will say that for a small fee, you will get access to companies that pay you to fill out a simple form online. Sounds good, right? There's one huge problem with this, though. The form the ad is referring to is the Google Adwords ad creation interface, and the companies they are referring to are Paydotcom, and Clickbank, which are affiliate networks. 

Now, affiliate marketing is a genuine way to earn money online, and you do not need to pay anyone for access to Clickbank or Paydotcom, or ANY affiliate network out there. You can just run a simple Google search for afffiliate networks and find more than you'll ever need, and the networks themselves won't charge you a fee for joining them. However, affiliate marketing is a long way from simple data entry.


Assembly Jobs

The way assembly jobs were advertised may have changed but it is still the same scam: for a small fee, you are able to get a list companies who will pay you to assemble their products and mail them out. 

What you get is a list of companies, and all of them are pretty much the same. They work like this: you contact them about getting paid to assemble their "products" and they send you out a "starter kit." You must pay for the "starter kit" and it includes the materials needed to make a certain amount of the "product." You finish assembling the product and mail it back to the company. The problem is that they will pay you only for those products that they deem "acceptable," and considering that the materials they send you are substandard, and you don't know ahead of time what "acceptable" means, you most likely will end up with nothing paid out on the batch...maybe you might get a few cents here and there. Then you must pay for another "kit" and the cycle continues. 

Rebate Processing

Rebate processing offers work much like the data entry offers do: you are sold a package of information on how to become an affiliate marketer and the "rebate processing" is a strategy employed to get sales. 

It works like this: Let's say you find a product on Clickbank that sells for $50 and the commission rate for it is 50%. So for every sale you make, you earn $25. The "rebate" strategy is that you offer your prospects $5 to buy from you, so essentially, you are taking $5 off the purchase price for them...which is the "rebate." When you get paid by the affiliate network, you profit $20.  

Now, this strategy can work, but you are going to need the funds to be able to offer your customers these immediate "rebates" in order to encourage them to buy from you while you wait for the affiliate network to pay you, which usually happens at the end of the month. To lessen the need for immediate cash, you can word it so that the $5 rebate will be paid upon verified sale, so that you're essentially paying each person after you have been paid, but this makes the strategy less effective. You also have to keep in mind that you will have advertising costs to consider, if you use the paid forms of advertising to drive traffic to your affiliate offer. 

The bottom line is that rebate processing jobs have nothing to do with getting paid to process rebates and the information that you pay to get is available for free on the Internet,


Stuffing Envelopes

This one has been around for a long time...it used to be that you'd see advertisements for this in your local paper, and you probably still do, but now its gone online. The offer is this: for a small fee, you will get a report that tells you how you can get paid for every envelope you stuff. When you get the "report," it instructs you to place an ad in your local paper or online about how they can purchase that same report from you.You aren't getting paid to "stuff envelopes," you are getting paid for every "report" you sell.This sort of thing is not exactly legal since it is a big circle, where nothing of real value is created,  which brings me to the last category of scam: the pyramid scheme.

Pyramid Schemes

Pyramid schemes can come in many flavors, but they all work the same way: you are paid to bring in other members into the system, and for every person you refer, you are also compensated a certain percentage for their referrals. 

That said, many legitimate businesses use this compensation model, but the difference is that those businesses are actually selling a product with real world value outside of the system. In pyramid schemes, there is no product, or the "product" has dubious value, and your main form of compensation is derived from your referrals and a percentage of their referrals. 

Examples of pyramid schemes are "cash gifting", "self-replicating websites" and matrixes. 

In cash gifting, you generally receive a list of people, either by email or regular mail. You are instructed to send $5 to the person at the top of the list, and to add your name to the bottom of the list, removing the name of the person to whom you sent the $5 to. Then you mail the