Work From Home Opportunites, Work From Home Scams
Jul/091
Advertisements for so-called “work-from-home” opportunities are increasingly ubiquitous, and rip-offs based around these “opportunities” are among the fastest growing type of scams.
The Federal Trade Commission brought a lawsuit this week against one such business, known as Google Money Tree, which purported to tell its customers how to make money by filling out forms and doing Internet searches. Those who signed up were asked for bank account information, according to the FTC. The customers were then billed a $72.21 monthly membership fee that wasn’t previously disclosed, according to the lawsuit.
There appear to be hundreds of other work-from-home scams out there. Their appeal is obvious: everyone is worried about making ends meet and there are few real opportunities for the unemployed or underemployed.
But we wonder if, as many of these scams are exposed, if another point isn’t going to be missed by much of the public: along with all of the scams, there are also some real businesses establishing themselves that offer people the opportunity to work from home.
None of them will make you rich, the way scammers claim to be able to. And all of them require some skills beyond filling out forms or searching the Internet.
The most opportunities seem to involve providing content for the thousands of new websites that are springing up.
Businesses like Associated Content and ehow.com offer the opportunity to work as a writer or videographer, providing content for other people’s web sites. The pay is lower than what established writers working through more traditional channels get, and a person certainly couldn’t make a living off these sites. But they do, in fact, offer the opportunity for a person to work from home, on their own hours and at their own pace, without even the hassles that traditional freelance writers contend with of finding and dealing with clients.
The editor of afflicter.com has even done some work for these sites, as well ad Demand Studios and constant-content.com (my own affiliate link here) and found them to be not a bad way to make a few extra dollars in your spare time.
Again, the work they offer is harder than filling out forms, and isn’t enough to make a living. But they do in fact offer the opportunity to do real work, for a little bit of real money, from home.
As for the scams, here’s a good overview of how Google Money Tree worked, as posted on youtube by Reviewaroo.com:
