Resources Ensuring You Never Get Scammed

The internet is loaded with SCAMS aimed at taking as much money from you as possible in shortest amount of time. With so many innocent people trying to find a great opportunity to work at home it’s easy for scam artists to draw you in with promise of riches.

Fortunately, there are resources available for you to check with to help ensure that you are not helping a scam artist to get rich by throwing away your hard earned money.

There are quite a few of these opportunity “regulators” as I like to call them. Use these resources to investigate an opportunity before you get involved and/or send any money:

1) Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov): The FTC has a lot of information for businesses and consumers. You can check out things such as top 10 consumer fraud complaints, work-at-home schemes, your legal rights, and much more. You can also file a complaint if you have already had a problem. 2) Better Business Bureau (http://www.bbb.org): The BBB is a very well known and reliable resource for checking out businesses. They provide information on over 2 million organizations. You can find reliability reports on organizations as well as a lot of other helpful information. As with FTC you can also file a complaint at BBB if you need to.

3) Scambusters (http://www.scambusters.org/): These guys claim to be #1 Publication on Internet Fraud. You can find a wealth of information and resources on this site aimed at avoiding scams and fraud. They also offer links to other sites that may be helpful.

As more and more people opt-out of conventional jobs and instead choose to work from their homes, number of work-at-home scams has also increased. Each year thousands of people find out hard way that opportunities which are too good to be true usually are but not before they invest and waste millions of dollars a year.

You don't have to be one of those unfortunate people. All you need to do is to become more informed, ask appropriate questions, and know what to do if you are victim of illegitimate opportunity.

Become More Informed

One of first things you should become aware of are types of business opportunities which are most frequently scams.

One of oldest of these scams are stuffing envelopes and/or assembling items in your home. You'll find these opportunities in lots of sources, even some that are legitimate. However, what most of these ads fail to say is that you have to pay them a fee to begin. Then after you complete your job, your work is often rejected as substandard and, of course, you never see a penny. The other thing that happens is that you have to send in money only to receive instructions on how to place an ad just like one that you've just placed in order to bring individuals just like yourself.

Another common work-at-home scams are Pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes are often passed off as MLM (multi-level marketing) opportunities, but there is a key difference. Pyramid schemes are more concerned with having you bring in more people and less concerned with selling products. The reason is that they aren't making their money off of selling anything to actual customers but from taking money from hopeful entrepreneurs like you. Most of these schemes ask you to make an investment or a purchase in order to become a full-fledged participant and/or to receive all of your potential profits. Generally, you never see any of earnings promised in their advertisements.