Scammers to watch out for

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Look for These Five Key Phrases to Identify a Work at Home Scam
On 03.25.10 , In Known Scams, by Steve

It doesn’t take much to identify a work at home scam. Here are a few key words that will help you decide if that job is legitimate.

Nearly every scam running rampant today is a variation of one of the items listed below. Read them and arm yourself with knowledge to avoid losing any more money.
Payment (or Check) Processing

These types of “jobs” want you to accept checks, deposit them into your bank account and send a portion off overseas and keep a portion for yourself as payment. Problem here is the checks are either fake or stolen and will eventually bounce. You’ll have access to the funds before they bounce though, allowing you to send the money away.

Some time after you’ve sent the money overseas and after you’ve spent the money you were “paid” for processing the check, that check will bounce leaving your bank account thousands of dollars in the red. YOU will be held 100% responsible for that money and YOU will have to repay every cent back to your bank.
Data Entry

Let me preface this by saying, there are legitimate data entry jobs, but they are few and far between. They don’t pay well and it’s near impossible to land a real position. The data entry jobs I’m talking about are the ones that promise you thousands of dollars for filling in forms.

Anyone can fill in a form. It’s relatively simple and requires no skill; however data entry scammers are telling you that you can become a millionaire practically overnight just by typing a few words into a box. It’s no surprise that they’re lying. Instead of hiring you for a job, they’ll sell you “training materials” which teach you how to get started in pay-per-click marketing, which is nothing more than buying ads on Google Adwords. The training materials will cost you several hundred dollars and will tell you to invest upwards of thousands of dollars into Adwords to buy clicks. The system is terribly outdated and you will lose pretty much all of the money you invested.
Rebate Processing or Auction Listing

These two key words share similarities. Both are backed by scammers who insist that big name companies like Dell, Sony, and Apple want to pay you to list their products on auction websites or to process refunds for their customers; neither of which makes any sense.

Big name companies have full-time employees, online stores, and warehouses to handle these types of things. They aren’t hiring random people from the Internet to accept refunds and post auction listings online.
Package Reshipping

If I typed out a full description here, I’d just be repeating points I made above so I’ll just give you the jist of package reshipping. You accept packages purchased with stolen credit cards and identities and reship them to criminals overseas. You won’t get paid and this is highly illegal.
Western Union

Nearly ever scammer wants to use Western Union to either send money to you or receive money from you. A good rule of thumb is to NEVER accept a job that requires you to use Western Union or any other type of money transfer service for that matter. It’s near impossible to recover money you sent away via Western Union and it’s even harder to track the individual receiving the money.

Seeing as the Western Union name is becoming synonymous with scammers, you would think they would ask a few basic questions to people who are about to send money away. Think of how much money could be saved if the Western Union rep asked if this money is being sent due to a “check processing” job or if the person sending the money actually knew where it was going.

These are the most common phrases I’ve found listed in online scams. Do you know of any more? Leave a comment below and help me build this list!
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