Avoiding Work At Home (Home Business) And Internet Scams – Part II

By:Guillermo Jalil

In Part I of Work at Home (Home Business) Scams, there was a list of home business opportunity scams. In this article we will list some more types of home business and internet scams. There is an increasing number of scams on the internet involving sweepstakes, membership clubs for free money or merchandise.

Home Typing, Medical Billing, and More.

There are lots of work-from-home scams that involve persuading you that some industry has more work than it can handle, and so has to outsource to people working from home. For example, you might be told that you’d be typing legal documents, or entering medical bills into an electronic database. These scams have one thing in common: they all say that all you need is your computer and they all then go on to say that you need to buy some ‘special software’.

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 simply as cynical marketing for the software.

MLMs and Network Marketing

As you can see there are hundreds of MLM money-making schemes. Not all of them are bad but watch out because a lot these are scams. The most popular one is to pay a high amount of fee to join – Let’s say this maybe ok to some extent. After you join, you are encouraged to purchase their training material which includes books, tapes, CDs etc. In fact your sponsor (your referrer) and your upline is making money from the sale of these training materials. Also, you will be invited to meetings and seminars where you have to pay some entry fee to listen to a successful member.

Soon they will encourage you to sell the training material to your downline because that’s how you are going to make money! In fact there are people who make six figure incomes in this and it is because they sell a lot study material and also have a downline who sell a lot of the study material. While selling these study material, they mention that these expense are tax deductible. Think about this. Why should you pay to get training and listen to successful members in order to learn how to sell their products? Have you ever worked for a legitimate company as sales person where you have to pay them to train you to sell their products and services?

Chain Emails

Here what it is… You have to send some money to 5 people on the list. After this, remove the name on the top of list and add you name at the bottom (your name is #5 now). Forward this email to others through bulk email and ask them to do the same. The email says that you will receive money as others start doing what you did. First of all spam is a crime. Before the email era, this was done through snail mail and this was considered a crime according to the USPS.

This eventually is supposed to make you a multi-millionaire! If this was so easy, we would be having millionaires all around us. If you can in your email client, just mark these emails as spam so in this way you don’t even get to read it.

Getting Free Merchandise

This is a scam where you have to join a membership club by paying a fee that promises you expensive merchandise like computers, laptops, jewelry, TV etc. This is very tricky and misleading. You have to refer more people to join the club by paying the same membership fee. You may bring in some people to join the club but not enough to get the free stuff. A lot of them give up. The people who started the club keep the membership fee. This is absolute scam! Remember to keep your money in the wallet. You have a better chance to make money or win that merchandise in a lottery/sweepstakes.

Vacation prizes

You get this email that says Congratulations, you have been selected to receive a great vacation. Send money to cover the administrative expenses and taxes. And, then you don’t hear anything about. If you contact them, then they will encourage you to upgrade to a Luxury cruise or 5 star hotels. When you get there, that cruise or hotel is nothing like described when you paid for the upgrade.

Here what you can do when you receive such offer. Ask them for the phone number of the cruise line or 5 star hotels. If you succeed in getting it, the call those numbers and make sure there is a reservation in your name and also ask about the features of those cruise line or hotel. In this way you can avoid this scam.

The Infamous Nigerian Email – 419 Email fraud

How can a list of internet scams be complete without even mentioning the Nigerian email? So, here you go. These fraud emails are referred to as 419 emails. You will receive an email stating that there is some money (usually more than 30 million dollars) that the sender received by some miscalculation or due to the death of relative in a plane crash or something like. It is amazing that they pick a plane crash from the news and also get pictures of the burial with the name on the tombstone. The last name on the tombstone may even match that of the sender of the email.

The sender gets the money if it leaves the country in certain number of days (usually a short period of time so that the recipient shows some urgency). Or the other twist is that the deceased person has 30 million dollars in a US bank and that needs to be transferred to someone’s account in the same country. If you help them out they will give you $4,000,000 to $5,000,000.

If you do respond to this email, then they will ask you for your bank details. Also, you will be asked to give some advance fee and taxes, which are usually much less (few hundreds to thousands) than what you are going to get $5,000,000! Once you start paying advance fee, there will be some problems/ complications like some official needs to be bribed to get involved. There are always some complications that needs some money to resolve. You keep sending money to a bank account in Nigeria. Can you imagine filing a lawsuit against someone in Nigeria? Eventually, the recipient will lose a few thousand dollars. It has been estimated recently that US alone loses 1 million dollar per day. This is an international scam. You can imagine how much is lost worldwide.

As you can see, running a ‘home business’ that just involves ‘working’ for one company is a bad idea. You are better off at your old office job where at least your ex-employer was legit! With Home business opportunities, you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Here’s the clincher, though: even with entirely legal work-at-home offers that do pay you for your work, you still won’t make anywhere near as much as you can with your very own home business. Visit http://www.internetandmoney.com to discover how you can make money on the internet from multiple streams of income ideas. Also, visit http://www.startsellingonebay.com for eBay selling tips.

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Article keywords: making money on the internet, ebay shopping tips, internet safety, buying on eBay

Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

The author Guillermo Jalil runs several businesses as corporate officer and is a start-up consultant for small businesses. Visit Buying on eBay: eBay Shopping Tips & Multiple Streams of Internet Income

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