Recognizing Work-At-Home Scams

VirtualVocations™ purpose is to help you locate legitimate work-at-home positions that will allow you to meet your personal and family needs. There are many job listings across the Internet that advertise as “work-at-home”, or “virtual” positions. Many of these jobs are not legitimate, or require you to pay a fee to work. Below are some helpful tips for recognizing legitimate and non-legitimate employment offers:

• Fees-Never pay a fee to work for someone else. Most of the time, you are paying for information that will show you how and where to post the exact same job listing and collect the same fee from other unsuspecting job seekers. A company should never require you to pay a fee, whether they say it is a one-time setup fee, software fee or for anything else. The company, if legitimate should pay for all start up costs.
• Exorbitant Amounts of Income-We’ve all seen them, make $5,000-$10,000 a month working part-time. The old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” is a good motto to live by when searching through employment ads. Remember, people who are making that much money in income have usually spent years working to reach that position, it doesn’t come overnight. Most legitimate work-at-home ads will pay per project or on an hourly basis.
• data entry-There are a lot of data entry employment postings out there, and most of them are scams. Remember, any job listing that gives a general amount of income, say $300-$500 a week, is most likely not legit. If you aren’t sure, send email requesting the name and contact of the company you will be working for and the hourly rate. Most data entry positions that aren’t scams pay by the hour or by the key strokes/number of words.
• Wiring Funds Overseas-This is a relatively new work-at-home scam. This involves scam artists using regular people like those looking to work from home to open a bank account in their name, receive money from people the scammers have scammed, then wiring it to accounts overseas that are not traceable. DO NOT get involved in any employment offer that requires you to use a personal banking account to receive monies for the business.

It can be frustrating continually browsing through the various job boards and employment listings on the Internet trying to locate legitimate positions. We advise to be careful, never pay any money to work for someone, and keep looking, legitimate jobs ARE out there!

Posted:Friday, September 28, 2007