Make Money From Home

A Salutory Lesson!

A quick look at any internet-based job search results, be it on craigslist or on another job site, will reveal a host of job offers enticing you to make money from home quickly and easily, raking in hundreds of dollars a day with just an email account and some quick thinking.  Even the newspaper classifieds have been filled with these ads, offering at-home data processing jobs or money-by-email offers.  Though a very few of these make money from home ads are legitimate, the grand share of them are scams.  How do I know this?  Because I was caught up in one of them myself.

Though the old envelope-stuffing or pyramid schemes have died out for the most part, these online make money from home schemes have largely` replaced them.  They’re really enticing, offering good, easy money from the comfort of your own home and keyboard.  I was home from college for a few weeks and had a lot of time to kill before going back to school.  I was pretty close to broke, so making money from home seemed like a great idea.  I replied to one of the job postings, inquiring about the position and sending in my resume for the company’s review. 

I received a quick reply, which told me that I had been approved and that I would be processing all sorts of orders from home, all I needed was an email address.  The email was vague on what sort of work I would be doing, which should have roused my suspicions.  It did, but not enough to make me stop reading.  The email said the only thing I had to do was complete a seven dollar payment to the company via PayPal to verify that I was serious about the application and to cover the cost of sending me my “training materials.”  This should have set off an alarm as well.  Imagine, you apply to work at a company, they agree to hire you, but ask you for a $10 bill first.  Still excited about my luck, I paid my money.  In return, I received a MS Word file detailing how to propagate the scam, putting up job postings, offering the job processing orders, and then receiving money from the suckers who replied to the posting. 

After a lot of badgering, the guy who scammed me eventually refunded my payment.  A quick Google search (don't forget to do this to keep safe!) revealed that the scam is pretty well known, and that I should have realized that it was too good to be true.  If you really want to make money from home, stay away from these scams and look for postings which look for freelance writing, editing, or design.  If anybody wants you to pay money in order to take a job you’re going to get scammed without a second thought.