Top 5 Work At Home Scams of 2007

The following are common work from home scams that I ran into in 2007. Some of the scams listed below are timeless and have been around since the late 90's, some are new and some are just re-vamped 2.0 versions of old scams. In either case you should avoid these scams in 2008, as I'm betting they will be around in 2008 as well. You've been warned! Happy New Year!

1. Payment Processor & Wire Transfer Scam:
A company claiming to represent countries outside the U.S. needs you to cash check or wire money on behalf of their international clients who can't cash these checks for some elaborate reason. You're allowed to keep a portion of the check cashed. Long story short, you get screwed. Your bank may drop you like a hot potato or you may get a phone call from the feds like I did when falling for this one.

2. Typing and Data Entry Work At Home Scams:
There are so many variations of this scam. But it usually involves you paying a fee to get a list of companies that will hire you to do data entry or typing. Depending on the "scam artist", the list will actually be real companies that really do hire for traditional data entry. But in most cases you could have got this list for free if you did your research. Or in other cases the list is affiliate companies which again you could have found for free and you're being taught how you can get paid for typing ads on behalf of these affiliate programs which in itself is true if your ads convert. However you didn't need to pay for this information and it's not necessarily traditional typing or data entry. This is a grey area for me. There are many companies that charge for information you can get for free. Plenty of authors, magazines and newspapers are guilty of this and people don't cry foul. So I think this more falls into misleading advertising.

3. Paid Survey Scams:
This is another case of paying for a list of legitimate survey companies that do actually pay you for your opinions. But again you could have received a list of legitimate paid online survey companies for free if you did your research. I think this is also viewed more in the light of a scam because the people that sell these list really exaggerate how much money you can earn and how fast. So again this is a grey area in terms of being a scam.

4. Envelope Stuffing Work From Home Scam:
The claim is you can earn anywhere from $1-$5 stuffing envelopes. You send in some "processing fee" to become trained. And the so-called job turns out to be that you're expected to post the same ads that you just fell for to get the next sucker to send you money. Look, in this day and age of technology there is no way a company is going to pay you to stuff envelopes! I don't care how convincing the ad sounded. It's a scam and "ain't no more to it". You will end up losing money.

5. Email Processing Scam:
Okay this is an easy one, merely refer to the envelope stuffing scam above except you're using email. The results are still the same. It's a scam to be avoided.

So that's my list. Some of the scams are easily avoided just by doing your work at home scam research before coughing up your hard earned money. In my opinion it's never really a good idea to pay for a list of work at home companies because that stuff is available on so many great free work at home websites.

Now that you're in the know. Don't be a victim in 2008! What do you guys think? Please post your comments below and feel free to share this article if it moves you.