You’re excited. A company has just contacted you with an offer for a work at home job, and you’ve been searching for weeks or even months. Finally all your hard work seems to be paying off.

There’s just one problem. They want you to pay for a background check, and you aren’t quite sure you remember the company name. Or maybe you do kind of remember them, but you can’t find any good information about them online or anywhere else.

What do you do?

It’s a sad fact that there are many work at home scams out there, and a popular one is to get people to pay for a background check for a job that doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, a very few legitimate companies also make potential employees pay for background checks, making it very difficult to know for certain what you should do when asked.

Your very first step is to start asking around if someone else knows of the company.  Many work at home message boards have very knowledgeable members who can help you figure out if you should consider taking the chance.

They’ll probably tell you no unless the company is well known.

There’s a simple reason for such skepticism. Most often such offers are scams.

Sure, the cost of a background check doesn’t seem like much. It’s not hundreds and hundreds of dollars, after all.

But that’s what they count on when they send you the job offer. They’re trying to get past your “I can’t afford to lose that much money” radar and give you the feeling that you can afford to risk a small amount if it means you’ll finally be working at home.

When you’re looking for a work at home job, no matter how frustrated you get with the difficulty of the entire process, it’s vital that you not let your guard down. Don’t suddenly start trusting an offer just because you really, really need the job. You have to be a skeptic. It’s the best protection you have.

Your best bets are to always stick to reputable companies that are known for hiring at home employees and resources that provide screened opportunities. If you go beyond these resources in your search, increase your skepticism.

There are legitimate work at home jobs listed even on sites such as Craigslist where anyone can place an ad. But the lack of screening means that scams do get through.

You should be wary if they ask for any money at all. You should be wary if they want your bank account information, even if they say it’s for direct deposit, doubly so if you haven’t actually received any pay at all yet. You should be wary if the pay is oddly high for the work you’ll be doing.

You just plain need to be careful if there’s no proof that you’ve found a legitimate company.

Sadly, a healthy mistrust of unproven opportunities is a good thing when you’re job hunting at home. It can save you a lot of money and heartache.

Please note, this is intended as humor. None of this would be a good idea and could get you into trouble if you tried it.

You’ve been thinking about working at home, haven’t you. You want it all, the money, the house, the car, the free time. All without effort. Well, now is the time!

It’s easy! All you have to do is stuff envelopes. Tell people that you’ll send them information on how to start their own business for just $19.95. Get their money and tell them to put up the same ads you just did. They can then do just the same as you. They’ll love you for it. The Postmaster will love you for it. Everyone will love you for it. Even your future cellmate will love you for it.

Once you’ve started that, it’s time to start some data entry. All you have to do is fill in some forms and off you go. You’ll be making money in no time. Pay no attention to the money flying out of your wallet as you pay for the ads that the forms create.

Now just to be sure some money comes in, let’s apply for a work at home job. The application fee just means you’re interested, right? And the software they want you to buy looks great. Really useful. $5000 per month working part time is just amazing. Life’s going to be so good.

Hey, is that a package in the mail? Now who wanted that shipped to them? Overseas? No problem! Just cash that traveler’s check and send them the extra, keeping your share for pay. This stuff is just so easy.

Wait. Google wants to pay you? Yippee! Such a small cost to get started you know it has to be good. Pay no attention to the fine print hidden in the terms of service. You might even be able to do the same with Twitter! Tweet, tweet!

Now is the time to share the bounty with friends. Join a group and all of you gift $1000 to a randomly chosen person. Keep doing that until you’re all rich from those $1000 cash gifts you’ve given each other and don’t forget to bring in some new recruits! Remember, it’s a gift so of course the IRS will have no problem with it.

Isn’t it wonderful how little effort and money all this cost? Now where’s my mansion and sports car?

I’ve posted in the past about the Google Money and related scams. Now I’m reading on Marketing Pilgrim that they’re finally suing the scammers for using the Google name.

It’s a kind of interesting situation since they don’t yet have the names for all of the defendants. That’s one of the challenges of the internet, of course. Scams thrive because they can be done anonymously.

Google’s doing what they can. They’re permanently disabling associated AdWords accounts in general that provide a poor user experience. But it’s challenging because it’s so easy to pop up under a new name when you’re online.

These are the names Google says to be aware of now:

Names to be wary of: Google Adwork, Google ATM, Google Biz Kit, Google Cash, Earn Google Cash Kit, Google Fortune, Google Marketing Kit, Google Profits, The Home Business Kit for Google, Google StartUp Kit, and Google Works.

They know quite well that more names will appear; that’s the nature of this kind of scum.

It’s kind of a pity to see the name Google Cash up there, as there was also a legitimate product by that name, made by Chris Carpenter. But now the scammers have used it too.

As always, remember that no product can guarantee you riches or any degree of success. If they’re making wild promises, just don’t believe it.

There are products that can help you along the path to building a real business, but there are still a lot of factors that may keep you from succeeding, allow you to succeed beyond your wildest dreams, just let you earn a little extra spending cash or anything in between. It’s mostly up to you. The information just helps.

Oh, for life online to be so easy! Earn $200-500  a day doing data entry! It just. sounds. so. easy.

Yeah, I don’t trust it. And I’ll tell you why.

First and foremost, they aren’t offering a data entry job. They’re talking about affiliate marketing. The two are not related. What these guys are really offering is pay per click affiliate marketing, more likely than not.

Now, pay per click affiliate marketing is legitimate. Take my advice, though, and learn it from someone with a solid reputation such as Perry Marshall. You’ll be much better off than if you buy information from someone who doesn’t even admit the difference between data entry and affiliate marketing.

You know you’re not that dumb but they sure think you are.

Other Problem Signs

It’s more than just that I can tell at a glance some of what they’re talking about. There are other scam signs too.

They’re being a little smart and saying that the cost is to let you know about companies you can work for. But do you really think you’re getting paid hundreds of dollars to fill out 4-5 lines of information for companies?

That’s not what’s happening. You’re taking more of a risk than just a few moments to fill out a little information. The financial risk to pay per click marketing is huge. You are paying, as they say, per click, whether or not the person buys. That gets expensive if you haven’t mastered it, and not everyone will.

Do you really think that there are jobs where employers will not turn you down? They’re promising that none of their “employers” will turn you down.

There’s a good reason for that part. They aren’t employers. They’re businesses selling electronic products such as ebooks through Clickbank. They don’t screen affiliates (NOT employees!), that’s Clickbank’s job.

And then there’s that cute little tidbit about having only 4 spaces left. I don’t expect that number to change. I’ve seen this site a few times and it never does. If they still have 4 spaces left, they’re lousy at filling them. It’s just a trick to make you feel as though you have to hurry.

You don’t. You can get what I think are better products elsewhere.

What If You Want to Do Data Entry?

I have to admit, I find it a little amusing that one of their bonuses is a list they say is of traditional data entry jobs, of the sort that likely pay by hour they say. Even they know that a lot of people coming to their site are looking for real data entry work at home jobs, not a business.

You don’t need to pay them for that. I have a free list of data entry work at home jobs for you right on this site. Why buy one?

Does This Mean Affiliate Marketing is a Scam?

One of the things I dislike about this kind of scam is how strongly it associates with affiliate marketing. Gives a good industry a bad name.

Are there scuzzy, scammy affiliates? You’d better believe it! Too many work in the work at home/home business field, as it’s prime for people losing their heads and not doing their due diligence.

That doesn’t make the industry bad. It makes those people and their particular businesses bad.

If you want to learn it, do so! Go for Perry Marshall’s AdWords Guide if it’s pay per click you want to do. Go for Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook for a different style of affiliate marketing. Just go for it and keep it honest.

Are those affiliate links?

You’d better believe it. But they’re to products I trust, ones that don’t try to pretend to be jobs. Or even all that easy, for all some people do brilliantly at them.

Just always remember the difference between work at home jobs and home businesses, and understand the risks you take.

I hear from a lot of people worried about being scammed while looking for a work at home job. It’s tough to know which companies to trust, even when they aren’t asking for money upfront.

If you can stand it, sometimes the best solution is to create your own opportunity. That’s right, start a home business. You’ll have ups and downs with a business, and have to deal with clients who are reluctant to pay you, but at least you’re in charge.

It’s not for everyone, of course. There’s stress involved. It can take a long time to earn anything. But if it’s taking ages to find a legitimate work at home job you really aren’t losing out by starting a business. You might even earn more than you would have from a work at home job.

Here are some that you may want to consider:

Affiliate Marketing

I’m rather fond of this one. Affiliate marketing earns me some pretty good money some months. Lousy income other months. There’s quite a bit of range in there.

There are scams possible in this one, so it’s important to remember that you should never pay to become an affiliate. The merchant should be making their profit off selling to the customers you refer to them, not from you.

One of the keys to succeeding as an affiliate is finding an interesting niche, nothing too broad at least for your early efforts.

SiteBuildIt’s Affiliate Masters Course is a free resource on running your own affiliate websites. They’ll walk you through many of the steps you’ll need. It’s still up to you to make it work.

Errand Running Service

If you don’t mind being out and about a lot, running other people’s errands can be a good business. You can focus on helping out the elderly, people whose jobs keep them too busy to run their own errands, that kind of thing.

Virtual Assistant

This is a popular choice if you’ve been looking at all the data entry and customer service positions, although it’s not exactly the same thing. You may be doing some of those jobs as a virtual assistant, but if you have the skills you could also be working on a website, managing ads, writing and submitting articles, answering emails and so forth.

Writer

Another popular choice. There are plenty of freelance opportunities for writers. A lot of them don’t pay a lot, but as you get experience you can do better. You might be writing website copy, articles for websites, articles for magazines and so forth.

Blogging

Just another form of being a writer in many ways, but you can do it on your own. If you want to make a business of blogging, I strongly recommend getting a domain name and paid hosting rather than going with the free stuff. It looks better as you grow. Blogging to the Bank is one resource to help you learn how to make blogging pay off.

Other Home Businesses

There are tons of other home business ideas out there. The one thing I can promise you about them is that there are no guarantees. More home businesses will fail than succeed. That’s just life.

I’ve posted a bit about the Google Money and similar scams. Today I saw that Google has also posted their take on these scams.

It’s some good tips, although as usual the people who most need to read it will probably never see it. But they do go over the legitimate ways you can earn money from Google (AdSense and the Google Affiliate Network), plus some of the symptoms of these and other scams people try using Google’s name.

I particularly liked this section:

Some sales pitches use the word “Google” or other trademarks right in their name with targeted phrases like “cash,” “pay day,” “money,” “secrets,” “home business,” etc. If you can’t find it on our list of Google products or on the business solutions page, don’t trust it.

A great point for anyone facing any product making big claims while using some other company’s name.

I posted a while back about the Google Money scams. They’ve been all over the place, heavily advertised through AdWords, presenting itself as fake blogs and fake newspaper stories. Google finally did something about it, at least the parts that go through their site.

They terminated the AdWords accounts of those advertising them.

Not just suspended or deleted the ad campaigns. According to Search Engine Watch, they deleted the accounts and informed the account holders that they cannot open new ones. Period.

They mean business this time!

But don’t you worry! If you need big money promises, similar programs claiming you can make big bucks through Twitter are now out there, according to the L.A. Times.

Usual routine, you too can earn hundreds of dollars with little effort. Tons of Twitter followers! Big money! Easy!

Just pay a little money for shipping and handling. Oh, and even more per month, but that’s deep in the terms and conditions. You might not even notice until it shows up on your credit card.

These kinds of programs walk a very fine line on legitimacy. While they technically do list all charges, they’re often hard to find. In addition, the claims are pretty hard to believe for the simple reason that they aren’t likely.

Sure, some people do make good money with Google or with Twitter. Most people, even with instructions on what the other guy is doing… won’t. That’s business for you.

These companies can be deceptive about where they’re located and/or make it very difficult to cancel your subscription and get your money back when you find out what you’re being charged. They aren’t always on the wrong side of the law, but they’re often not far from the edge.

If you want to make money advertising on Google, study pay per click advertising. Perry Marshall is a reputable source.

Making money on Twitter can be more difficult, in part because it’s newer territory and there are fewer guides with a proven history. There are plenty of tricks to building a big following, but pick the wrong one and your account gets banned. Or just appear too spammy and see what happens.

Building a loyal following that cares enough about what you have to say in a tweet and will buy from links you post is an entirely different challenge.

It comes down to the simple truth that there is no easy solution to make big money for most of us. Sometimes someone will hit it lucky, but the next person to do what appears to be the same thing may not succeed. If it were that easy we’d all be earning the big bucks.

The hardest part about looking for a way to work from home is to dodge all the scams. Today I decided to let you have a little fun while doing so.

As you go through the various opportunities, see how many spaces you fill up, just as with regular Bingo.

How do you win? By avoiding scams, of course!

Sadly, there are many more ways I could have filled these squares. But it’s not a bad way to get started.

Common. Do I really need to say it?

I came across an article on CNN about work at home scams. What caught my attention was the statistic they used. Staffcentrix, a company that goes through home based job leads, finds there to be a 54 to 1 ratio of work at home scams to legitimate opportunities.

That sounds quite reasonable. Anyone who has searched much at all knows that the vast majority are scams. It sucks, but it’s true.

It’s so easy for scams to get going. The Internet is so anonymous. It’s cheap to get going. You can scam work from anywhere in the world. And with people getting desperate for solutions to their money problems right now, scams can take off all too easily.

Fortunately, there are many signs of work at home scams.

As the article says, be wary of “palm trees, beaches and bikinis”. That’s so true it’s ridiculous. These and other claims of big money are all too obvious in many scams.

In my work at home scams section on this site, I cover quite a number of scams and their symptoms. Some are classics, such as the envelope stuffing scams. Others are more recent, such as reshipping and payment processing scams.

The challenge doesn’t just stop when you find one of the relatively few legitimate opportunities, especially if you have a home business. Too many people will still assume it’s a scam because that’s what they expect with the phrase “work at home”.

Getting a work at home job doesn’t stop the perception completely either, believe me. I worked for 3 years as a medical transcriptionist and still had people certain that I was being tricked somehow, despite the regular paychecks and actual work being done.

With such a prevalence of scams, be alert as you search. Some work at home opportunities do indeed have people earning fantastic livings, but most won’t. Just as with any other sort of business, most home businesses fail. Just as with outside the home jobs, there’s competition for legitimate work at home jobs, and they can be very hard to land.

Set your expectations to realistic and be prepared to work hard. That’s one of the most important steps to successfully working at home.

Much as it would be nice to think otherwise, there are a lot of ethical considerations to working at home. There are quite simply a ton of work at home scams out there, and many people have no problem with promoting them, in the hopes that they will profit. What happens to others doesn’t matter to them.

A discussion on my forum got me thinking about this, with the result that on Saturday I made some new rules for the forum. Some are simply for courtesy, but others are about trying to keep the scams away.

Cash Gifting – Scam or Legitimate?

The problem had to do with the promotion of cash gifting. If you research it, you’ll find that the FTC advises against it. Cash gifting is a form of a pyramid scheme, and is illegal. You can be arrested for participating in one.

The only reason they stick around is because it takes so long for them to get reported by those who have lost money. It’s also very, very easy for new ones to pop up.

And yes, you can make good money from them if you’re one of the “lucky” ones. But in the end there will be far more “unlucky” people who will lose money. The process is quite simply unsustainable. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “1-up” program or not. They’re both illegal.

It really saddens me to see the common attitude of people promoting these opportunities. They really don’t care what happens to others so long as they get their money. Yet that should matter tremendously, or at least it does to me.

Many will justify themselves saying that it’s a gift because they aren’t expecting anything in return. Therefore they must be in compliance with IRS regulations. Promoters will often quote rules from the IRS on gifts to make their claim that what they’re doing is legitimate. You can give gifts, after all. It’s just that what the promoters are calling gifts don’t qualify.

Not that they’ll admit it. I say they’re lying to us or to themselves. People can be generous, but you aren’t going to put money into that kind of thing without the hope of a huge return on what you put in. That means it is NOT a gift.

A good read is this speech on pyramid schemes vs. legitimate marketing made by Debra A. Valentine in 1998. Yes, it’s a few years old, but the rules for spotting these haven’t changed so much as that. The biggest difference is perhaps how commonly you find pyramid schemes of one sort or another online.

Another is this post from early November by Kelly McCausey on someone she knows who fell for a cash gifting scam. It really can happen to anyone.

Work at Home Ethics May Not Be Simple

Such blatant scams aren’t the only area where you can hit ethical gray areas when you work at home. Allowing ads on your site can cause ethical questions. You wouldn’t believe how many flat out scams I’ve blocked on this site from Google AdSense, and they keep coming. It’s gotten to where I’m looking at better alternatives because it’s impossible to block all of them.

I don’t expect to have it solved soon. I am about 7 months pregnant, which means I have to start planning for when I have this baby, not to mention the amount of time a site revamp of that level will take. It’s in the planning stages, for my few free moments. A bit more control would be nice.

There’s also making sure the ads you place are accurate and that you aren’t involved in companies making false claims. This can be a particular problem when you’re in any sort of network marketing that involves any sort of health claims. If the claims aren’t proven, you may be asking for trouble. Personal experience doesn’t count for proof without scientific backing.

Add in treating those you deal with fairly. That means paying bills promptly, providing fair value for your services, and understanding that your fellow work at home parents are also just trying to earn a living from home.

Can You Be Proud of What You’re Doing?

Sometimes it comes simply down to whether or not you’re proud of what you’re doing and how you treat people. If you’re proud of taking advantage of people, you may have to look at your own ethics.

But if you find yourself embarrassed about what you’re doing or the claims you’re making, maybe there’s something wrong. It might be time to take a better look and find something you can be proud of.

If you start out in an opportunity and come to realize that it’s illegal, get out immediately. Reporting it can be an awkward but good thing to do. Just keep in mind that if you knowingly participate in something illegal, you can get in even more trouble than if you were unaware.

That does not mean ignorance is bliss. As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse. But with many work at home scams the greatest legal trouble is for those actively participating in it.

An unethical opportunity can ruin your reputation online, get you into legal trouble and lose you all the benefits you thought you had gained. It’s much better to start off with something sustainable and legitimate.