Work from home scams are booming

The rough economy of the last five years has left millions of Americans underemployed, unemployed or broke and filing for personal bankruptcy. With debts higher than ever and jobs hard to come by, many people have looked towards alternative means of earning a living. Among the most common advertisements seen in self-employment magazines are ads for varies jobs that allow you to work from home. That sounds great - you work from home, pay your bills, get out of debt, earn a good living and you can take care of household chores and the kids, too!

Unfortunately, many of these work from home plans are nothing more than scams designed to take the money of those who are looking to get out of debt. Once you have paid your fee to the company that promised you a living, you find out that the plan you had for earning a living from home isn’t workable, and you’re out some more money.

One of the more dangerous scams for working at home is known by various names, including “foreign agent agreements,” “reshipping,” or “money transfers.” You might answer an ad that tells you that the company is seeking a financial manager or a marketing manager with little or no experience. You read on and find out that the company is based overseas and that you will work from home as a financial intermediary. The plan, as explained to you, is that the company is located in a country that has huge taxes on financial wire transfers. You will serve as a middleman. The money to be transferred from one company to another will first be sent to you in the form of a cashier’s check. You will deposit the money into your account, take 5-10% of the amount as your fee and then forward the rest of the money to your employer. That sounds easy, and you’ll be told that it will only take a few hours per week to earn several thousand dollars per month.

The problem is that the checks they will send you aren’t any good. You’ll receive a check that looks real. You’ll deposit it into your account and be credited for the deposit. Then you’ll send the remainder on to your “employer”. A few days after you do that, you’ll get a call from your bank informing you that the check has bounced and that you owe them for the full amount, which you can’t pay because you’ve already sent the money to someone else.

This is a very expensive way to lose money in the “work from home” world. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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