A few days ago I wrote about work-at-home scams here. After a little thought, I decided to dig up a little dirt on this subject. I turned over a few virtual rocks out on the net, and sure enough, one of the work-at-home scammers crawled out from under one of them.
I visited the popular ‘craigslist’ web site to seek out some advertisements for work-at-home jobs. If you are not familiar with craigslist, it is basically a collection of sites (grouped by geography) that reads like a gigantic classified ad section of the newspaper.
All kinds of crazy stuff is advertised, and some of it is fun just to read since it is so outside the mainstream, and you never know what you will find. I should also point out that it is a very useful site if you are looking for something, and many more typical classified ads are also found there, in addition to the unusual stuff.
I began my search in the jobs section of a craigslist site, and did my best to filter out the obvious work-at-home scam ads, and see if I could ferret out some legitimate work-at-home opportunities.
Some of them seem to actually be legitimate work-at-home job openings, but I have had only one of them respond to my inquiry after making at least 10 inquiries. I suspect that the reason is that any legitimate work-at-home job opportunity results in a tidal wave of e-mail messages from people who want to work at home, and it becomes somewhat of an unmanageable task to answer all of them.
One way to tell the scams from the legitimate work-at-home opportunities is the speed of the response you receive. The scammers will most often answer your e-mail quickly, and be quite anxious to provide you with all the information you need to get scammed.
I responded to a few of these ads last night before going to bed, and I awoke to discover that one of them had responded. Keep in mind, I was trying to filter out the obvious scams, and was responding only to ads that looked like they may have been legitimate.
The scammer that responded to me was advertising a ‘Data Entry/Typist’ work-at-home job. I now wish I had saved the original ad, but it is no longer available on the craigslist site. Most likely because of the number of complaints the craigslist web site operators received from people reporting the ad as the scam that it obviously turned out to be.
The ad was written quite cleverly, and did indeed give the impression that it was a ‘real’ work-at-home job opening. The response I received revealed it as just another work-at-home scam however.
I would imagine it is very hard to keep the scam under wraps when you come down to the part of your message where you have to attempt to scam money out of people. That’s the real weakness in these scams. As soon as they start asking for money, the cat is out of the bag, and careening across the room in a frenzy as if its tail were on fire!
Here is a link to the actual e-mail message I received in response to my inquiry. I don’t normally do this, but in this case, I am leaving the e-mail message intact (except for my e-mail address), including the e-mail address of the person who sent it. I think she (or he ‘ who knows?) deserves full credit for their little scam.
I had originally intended to leave the full name that this person used (who knows if it is genuine) intact, but then decided to use the first initial of the last name instead. This is because I did a little Internet research and discovered that there are a number of real people with this name in the U.S. alone, and I don’t want to be associating the names of good people with some low-life like this who is attempting to scam money from people.
It’s possible that the e-mail address this scammer used may be just a ‘throw away’ address that was set up for the duration of this scam. The Yahoo! e-mail addresses are very popular tools of the ‘419 scammers’ and others who intend to send out e-mail messages for purposes that are somewhere south of ethical.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse here, but where these work-at-home ‘opportunities’ are concerned, you need to remember just one thing. If anyone asks you to pay for anything involving a work-at-home job, it is extraordinarily likely that it is a scam, and the information you receive in return for your payment will be worthless.
Some of these work-at-home scammers offer access to a web site that supposedly contains legitimate work-at-home job openings from mainstream companies. Others offer you the ‘training’ you need for the job, like the one I received last night.
It’s all about scamming people out of their money and making a quick buck. And to think that some of the people responding to these ads may be having financial hardships (like someone who recently advertised on craigslist looking for a work-at-home job) or may be disabled and unable to work outside their home reveals these scammers as the true low-life scum that they really are.
This information applies to any work-at-home job opportunities you see advertised anywhere — and I do mean anywhere. No exceptions! So be careful and don’t let the work-at-home scammers make you another victim.
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