Avoiding Work-At-Home Scams

After my second daughter was born and I started looking for a work-at-home job, I must have fallen for nearly every hoax and scam in the book. I spent, literally, hundreds of dollars trying to "get rich quick" through various work-at-home "opportunities." After six months of utter failure, however, I got smart. I did my research, and I discovered five proven principles for avoiding work-at-home scams.

First, it is important to realize something about the way that the universe works. There is a basic principle in the universe that says you will get out of something whatever you put into it. If you put 2 gallons of gas into a car, you can't expect to go 50 miles. If you only put sugar into your body, you can expect to gain weight. The same is true with work-at-home opportunities: the amount and type of work that you put in is directly related to what you get out of it. If a given work-at-home opportunity promises to make you rich while you sit around eating bon-bons, it is probably a scam.

Very close to this concept is the idea that, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The fact of the matter is that there are few laws governing what someone can and cannot say to you about a work-at-home opportunity. In this way, it's like those commercials for diet pills: as long as they say that your "results may not be typical," they have a legal way out. You've got to train your sniffer to know when an opportunity is real, and when it is not.

Now, this next principle should seem very basic, but a lot of people get stuck on it. If someone says they want to "hire" or "employ" you, they will be paying you, not the other way around. Unless you're hiring a job search service, you should never give one cent to someone who says they are offering you a work-at-home job. If they are a potential "employer" and are demanding money, warning flags should go off in your head.