Will you tell me this isn’t an attractive proposition? Well, maybe with the exception of ME sitting there in my underwear. All kidding aside, these scams appeal to our despicable desire of greed – - A new house, a new boat, a better life Style, etc. We all have a tendency to run these delightful thoughts through our gullible brains. It’s an vital part of slick marketing.

As Jonathon mentions, a lot of these accomplish money on selling you the information on making money at home. They are long on promises but deliver little or nothing after you pay for the item.  What really irks me is when they advertise “never before published secrets of selling on the Internet”, and you discover it’s nothing but a repackaged course of materials that have been out there for the last couple of years. Everyone and his brother already know the “secrets”, and they are the ones that made money on them before you came along.

The secrets and “inside industry information” are things that I have already looked into before and are old and worn out. All right, I will admit that I paid for these things in the past, thanks to my gullible brain (and the greed factor). But, each time you find burned by these work-at-home schemes, you are getting closer to graduating from the School of Hard Knocks. I have my PhD now, thank you.

I have been a member of eBay since 1998 and have bought and sold a exquisite number of things. Because of that, I felt I pretty much understood how an individual seller and buyer operates on eBay and thought I understood the nuances for successful selling.

But hey! Making a living doing that is something else, a whole new ballgame. So an Internet ad caught my eye that promised unimaginable riches on how to build a living by selling stuff there. My brain shouted, “Hey, what the hell do I know” in the best New Yawk accent. It was a case of “I don’t know what I don’t know”, so maybe the guy selling this “insider’s” guide to eBay secrets knows a lot more than me on how to get rich by being a power seller.

After paying for and downloading the eBook, I didn’t have to read more than the first couple of pages to discover that:

1.I already knew everything in his book.

2.The same information is already on the eBay site.

Stung by this latest idiotic purchase, I demanded a refunded based on the fact that none of his supposedly secret stuff was a secret. He didn’t like it and resisted but I persevered and got my money back.

That’s just one example. And for the next, I will have to disagree somewhat with Jonathon’s list of jobs that you can make money with, specifically items # 1 & 3.

Paid Surveys. I signed up for one of these, and believe it or not, it was mentioned in a newsletter that publishes Internet scams to watch out for! And I did pay for membership in order to start doing “paid” surveys. On that point I will agree with Jonathon: never pay for this. I found out why.

After I became a member of this illustrious group of stare people, I found that:

1.When I clicked on their links that were supposedly premium paying survey sites, I then was enrolled in a bunch more just from signing up with the one site. I signed up with some more, and noticed that the list of sites that would send me surveys had grown into a monster. 

2.There was tremendous duplication with the survey sites. I would be asked (for the umpteenth time) to sign up for sites that I already had signed up with.

3.I could have found these “premium” sites fair by Googling “paid surveys”, and would have had 3.2 million hits! There was nothing “premium” about them.

4.I noticed that the overwhelming majority of these paid survey sites didn’t pay anything at all, but just entered you into a prize contest after filling out a lengthy survey. 

5.I noticed that the ones that actually did pay averaged around $2.00 for completing a witness. When it takes 30 minutes to complete that survey, you are getting paid $4.00 an hour of your time. I could flip burgers at minimum wage and obtain a lot more money!

6.I noticed that if you don’t fit into the demographics niche that they are looking for on some sites, you are thrown out of the survey with a polite apology. In my case, it was most likely due to my age, the fact that I don’t text-message, etc.

7.I noticed that when I completed surveys and got my name entered into a freaking prize drawing, it automatically entered my email address into the survey’s affiliate partners. In other words, the surveys are primarily cloaked infomercials for their paid sponsors. Now your inbox is ready to burst from the flood of spam.

Finally, on item # 3 of Jonathon’s list, I also disagree. Somewhat. I started up three blogs of my own through Google and inserted their Adsense ads in them. What’s discouraging is that you need tons of traffic to your site, and the visitors must click on the ads in order for you to get paid a few cents per click. When you consider there are millions of blogs out there, why should anyone want to visit yours? You then get into search engine optimization, keyword density, affiliate links, etc., in an effort to pull traffic to your blog. Even by submitting your blog’s URL to a free search engine submission site, it takes 8-12 weeks before the various search engines send their spiders to crawl over your blog and determine if you are worthy enough to gain a position on their engine.

Great job, Jonathon. I unprejudiced wanted to expand on some of your points and respectfully disagree with a couple of others.
Final two cents: if seems to be too estimable to be true, run the other way…

Work At Home Scams Image

Work At Home Scams Picture

Work At Home Scams Image

Work At Home Scams Image

Work At Home Scams Photo

Work At Home Scams Image