With swine flu, rising travel costs, higher unemployment, and the tougher challenges in just in making ends meet, many people are turning to work-at-home opportunities.  The upside can be great but please be very cautious about who you deal with. Too often work-from-home schemes turn out to be work-from-home scams.

Consumer Reports in the US recently ran an article about current scams being. The FBI also  recently gave guidance on what to look out for.

The Federal Trade Commission has since 2001 warned of the dangers of work-from-home scams and provides a categorization of work-at-home schemes (nicely using the term ‘flop-potunities’), but people are still being caught.

Two essential pieces of advice:

1.       Don’t pay upfront, whether it’s for inventory or “how to” information; most scams require you to pay for something that usually turns out to be worthless.

2.       Avoid network building and multilevel marketing schemes.

It’s so easy to be seduced by promises of a fast buck, pound, euro, or yen, especially when you need to earn money, so always have in mind the time-honored maxim: if it looks too good to be true, it is.

The only money we receive is from the clients whose work the ClickNworkers deliver, and also a little bit of advertising revenue, since we put Google Ads on the site.

If you know of a scam and want others to know, please contribute to the comments.