Do Not Let a Scam Shatter Your Dreams of Creating Your Own Work from Home Business

Starting and operating a successful work from home business is a dream shared by millions. Despite there being more small business opportunities than at any point in history, the real challenge is weeding through the scams to find the honest ones. The Internet, television, radio, and even the newspapers these days are filled with ad after ad promising to show you how to make thousands each week while working from home. Far too often, most work from home business programs will promise the moon, but fail to even earn your initial investment back. The most common scams on the market today include:  Making products from home; Data entry; Pyramid schemes; Medical billing and electronic insurance claim filing; and even stuffing envelopes.Are you good working with your hands? One of the biggest work from home opportunities out there are companies looking for people to build their products out of their homes and then sell them for profit. Naturally the pitch will vary somewhat to make it sound more genuine, but this is pretty much the standard line used to promote the home assembly scam. In reality, this is almost always a scam which requires you to invest hundreds, if not thousands, on the equipment and materials you will need for production. In the end, the company will refuse to buy the investors' products due to "inferior standards" while selling drastically overpriced equipment and materials.  It was a scam from beginning to end, whose only purpose was to sell the equipment at elevated prices.Stuffing envelopes seems like a great way to make some extra money and there are thousands of companies that want to show you how. This is perhaps one of the more clever scams that still manages to catch even the best of us by surprise when we realize what has actually happened. Investors place their own envelope stuffing ads in order to make their money back.  It never had anything to do with envelope stuffing! Without investing money for advertising and bilking others out of their cash, there is no legitimate way for the investor to ever recoup their money.Most people have a computer and Internet connection these days and the scammers are taking advantage of this fact. Aside from the Internet marketing scams, the most common small business scams involving the computer tend to center around data entry, online surveys, or even word processing work. While this information is vital to helping you get your small computer venture off the ground, you will first need to pay for it. But while the investor is waiting for specific information or perhaps even a job, what they usually end up with is some worthless and vague report about how much money they could make--just nothing specific, and certainly no job. Full of hype and big promises, these computer scams never amount to any legitimate work from home business and ultimately waste only time, money, and effort.Another work from home opportunity that would appear legitimate, but is not in most cases, involves the health care industry. These scams claim to show investors how to create a work from home medical billing service, which in theory would fill a legitimate market need while providing a high-paying opportunity. Assessing a wide range of assorted fees, the total cost of one of these work from home medical billing opportunities can run into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars!In return for what the programs promise, this rather substantial investment would probably be worth it and yet this is not the case for most investors. It is so hard to get contracts and make any money with these medical billing businesses that even the Federal Trade Commission has issued consumer warnings regarding these programs. These medical billing home based businesses amount to little more than scams due to the poor odds of recouping the initial investment, let alone earning a true living.Multi-level marketing, or MLM, is essentially a pyramid scheme and the most common scam out there. The bait is that the investor becomes a distributor where they will earn commissions for anything they sell plus a percentage of anything sold by anyone they recruit. With real products, a real office, and the semblance of a corporate structure, these scams can be very alluring to the unwitting investor. Point in fact, those products truly exist to disguise the MLM or pyramid and make it appear legitimate. Everyone below the people who actually started the pyramid will be lucky to pay their bills with this opportunity that is both illegal and destined to fail.Where home based business scams are concerned, these five are hardly the only ones you need worry about. Investors have to avoid these plus hundreds of variations when looking for legitimate opportunities out there in the work from home genre. Its seems there is no end to the scams but the true opportunities do indeed exist as well. Learning how to capitalize on the real small business opportunities while staying away from the scams often determines success.