Work At Home Business Scams to Avoid

Are There Legitimate Work At Home Businesses?

If you’ve ever thought of being your own boss, you may have dreamed of earning a full-time income from home. You’ve probably come across ads for all kinds of work at home opportunities. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those ads advertise programs that are complete frauds.

Here are some of the most common work at home scams being promoted right now…

Link-Posting Scams

These are scams that promise that you can make big money posting links online or posting links for Google. They often tell you that you can earn $15 for each link you post. They may even present you with a calculator like the following to try to get you to believe that you can make big money posting links:

Don’t believe these types of calculators. You are not going to make $382,200 posting links from home. In fact, the most likely scenario is that you’re going to lose thousands of dollars with programs like these? How? Because they will try to convince you that you need to pay for expensive coaching. Think about that – if it’s so easy to make money posting links then why would anybody need coaching to be able to do it?

You can see a long list of red flags to look out for with these types of scams at my Home Business Red Flag Priority Checklist here. That list will help you to avoid all kinds of scams. If you want to see some specific instances of this type of scam, you can take a look at some of the following warnings I’ve put out over the years:

All of these are designed to get you to talk to a high-pressure sales person. Sometimes they’ll claim that you’ll get a one on one consultation with a Success Advisor – they only thing they want you to be successful at is giving them as much of your money as possible.

Some of them will also offer access to a Members Development Center where they try to get you excited by telling you that you’ll get direct email access to a success advisor. Again, the whole goal here is to get you to talk to one of these so-called “Success Advisors” (high-pressure sales people) so that they can get as much money out of you as possible.

The Fake Search Engine Agent Program and Other Careers that Don’t Exist

They also try to trick people into believing that they’ll have certain types of careers that don’t even exist. Here are some of the titles you may see:

Search Engine Agent
Paid Link Poster
Paid Ad Poster

These types of work from home offers will try to convince you that you can have a career doing simple tasks on Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, by posting links, filling out forms, or other basic tasks. They may even display a logo claiming that they are partners with these companies. The truth is that these scams aren’t partnered or connected to those Internet search giants in any way whatsoever.

Again, the only thing they want to do is get as much money out of your debit card or credit card as possible. Sometimes, they’ll even start charging you monthly charges which you may not notice for several months.

Binary Options Software Scams

Binary options software scams have been flooding the market over the past couple of years. Why? Because the people promoting these scams can make hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars off of people who fall for them. Not only that, but often the same people fall for this same type of scam multiple times.

You can read my explanation about how 99% of all binary options software scams work at my Binary Options Scam Formula post. You’ll discover how fake and fraudulent these binary options programs actually are and you’ll learn why they are so incredibly dangerous.

Examples of Binary Options Software Scams

You can see how bold some of these scams are by watching a video I made debunking a fake review site some of the binary options scammers put out to try to trick even the people promoting the scam into believing that the whole thing was real. Here’s the video:

Here area a few warnings I’ve put out about specific binary options software scams:

Paid Survey Scams

There’s nothing wrong with doing paid surveys for a few extra bucks here and there or to earn some points that can be traded in for gift cards. But what the paid survey scams do is try to convince people that they can earn thousands of dollars a month by participating in paid surveys and focus groups. You can’t.

Here are some paid survey sites I’ve warned about:

Get Cash for Surveys (Gary Mitchell…a fake name)
Jason White Take Surveys for Cash at TakeSurveysforCash.com
Click 4 Surveys at Click4Surveys.com

MultiLevel Marketing Scams

Of course, there’s a great deal of debate as to which MultiLevel Marketing companies are legitimate and which are outright scams. Most people are better off avoiding MLM companies altogether. If it takes a law degree to figure out if a company’s compensation plan is legitimate, how would anybody ever expect to be sure that the company they are promoting is a legitimate MLM company and not a pyramid scheme, product based pyramid scheme, or a ponzi scheme? Some very smart people who thought they knew what they were doing have been fooled into thinking companies were legitimate that actually weren’t.

Here are a few MLM companies that looked good on the surface that were eventually shut down by the Federal Trade Commission:

Fortune High-Tech Marketing
BurnLounge
Zeek Rewards
Trek Alliance
World Class Network

Rebate Processing Scams

These have mostly disappeared. They were an incredibly popular scam back around 2008/2009. I put numerous warnings out about them back then. However, what’s interesting is that some of the link-posting scams actually use some of the testimonials from of the old rebate processing scams. You can see that in my Home Profit Masters scam analysis here.

You can also see many of the Rebate Processing scam testimonials in my post called Fakest of the Fake here. That post shows many of the testimonials that were used for Rebate Processor scams that are now being used for the link-posting scams.

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Work-At-Home Businesses That are Scams