Good with Your Hands - Beware of Work from Home Scams

Who doesn't dream of owning a profitable and successful work from home business? There are actually more legitimate opportunities for small businesses than ever before, but there are also more scams, too. You can't turn around these days without some ad telling you about the untold fortunes you can make if only you purchased their particular work from home program. In most cases, however, these programs tend to sell little more than hope and are in fact scams. Although new scams are created every day, pyramid schemes and computer-related work from home scams are the most common.  Let's take a look at the five most popular work from home scams out there today.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. Well, at least that is how the pitch goes. At the end of the day, this scam revolves around the investor purchasing expensive equipment and materials that the company insists are necessary to produce the goods. The business really only wanted to sell their expensive equipment and can easily avert their obligation to buy your products by inspecting them until they find flaws that make the products unacceptable.Stuffing envelopes seems like a great way to make some extra money and there are thousands of companies that want to show you how. The inventor of this scam was nothing less than an evil genius. But investors will never recoup their money by stuffing envelopes, but rather by placing an ad of their own! So you essentially must invest more money in advertising so you can help convince other people to "invest" in this work from home opportunity, and recoup your investment.Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can truly start a legitimate and profitable work from home business-- a fact that many scam artists are trying to capitalize on. The variations are abound in the computer work from home genre, but the two most common involve data entry and word processing scams. Of course a small fee is required, but you will supposedly earn that back in no time. What you get in return is typically some generic "work from home" guide telling you how you can make money from a small business--but no actual job or work itself! Without supplying a specific blueprint, these work from home opportunities amount to scams that only waste time, money, and effort.The legitimate health care worker shortage is being exploited by con artists as they create fake business opportunities supposedly designed to fill this void and make big money for people like you. Promising to teach you how to start small businesses in medical billing and even electronic insurance claim processing, these companies appear to be selling a legitimate service aimed at filling a true market need. 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. Consumers have even been warned by government oversight committees (FTC) about these medical billing home based businesses telling them that the prospect of securing work is low as is the likelihood of recouperating the initial investment. For the average investor, the dismal odds for success make these medical billing home based businesses little more than pipe dreams that will ultimately only cost them time, money, and effort.Appearing very legitimate and involving the selling of a particular product or service, the multi-level marketing scam is both a classic and one of the most popular out there today. They are appealing because they promise to make you a distributor so that you earn commissions from your sales plus the sales of anyone you recruit for the company. At first glance, all of these scams look like a golden opportunity and appear perfectly legal. In reality, the products/services really only exist to make the MLM appear legitimate. Pyramids are doomed to failure, illegal, and will never make the average investor any real money.Now these scams listed above are just the most common out there today. New scams and variations appear daily, making it increasingly difficult to identify legitimate work from home business opportunities. Conversely, you actually have a situation where there have never been more scams, yet more legitimate small business opportunities, than ever before. Learning how to capitalize on the real small business opportunities while staying away from the scams often determines success.