Legitimate ‘Work-at-Home’ Opportunity or Scam?
By Patricia Brucoli
The various schemes in the genre described below are rampant on the many job posting websites on the internet. So beware.
They are all something like this:
Work-at-Home and help someone in another country to do their accounts receivable and deposits from their American customers! A few hours a day, a trip to the bank, and get a percentage or fee for each transaction. Perfect part-time job from home, to augment your earnings while starting a home business, or to complement your portfolio of ‘work-at-home’ jobs? No way!
You process funds for the company ostensibly because of the amount of time it takes a non-US company to have US funds available. You being in the US and having a bank account can handle this much easier and faster for them!
So you are receiving payments from their clients, and then transferring the funds to your ‘employer’s’ bank. After all, money orders and cashier’s checks are ‘guaranteed’ according to banks. No one has access to your bank account, in many of these schemes, so where’s the risk?
If the funds transferred to you are no good, you will be liable - in the US, in spite of the fact that banks will say money orders and cashiers checks are “guaranteed”, 2 weeks later, when they finally figure out it is a forgery. You have already transferred the money out and now YOU are liable to cover the funds. YOU can also face criminal fraud charges.
As if this isn’t bad enough, another dimension to these types of scams is that if you accept packages to reship - the merchandise turns out to have been purchased with a phony credit card - YOU are liable to the merchant who got burned and YOU can go to jail for receiving stolen merchandise - in the US, not to mention using the postal service to do it (when you ‘forward’ it to their customers).
It can keep getting worse - you may end up getting your identity stolen - some applications seem innocuous, in that they only ask for your birthday, street address, etc. - but sometimes if you are in the US, they will, as your ‘employer’ say they are required to have your ’social security number’ for tax purposes -
Your social security number can be used to open credit cards in your name, etc.; YOU will be liable for the charges, and your credit may be ruined - incredibly, it can be very difficult to prove you are you and it can take years…
Always be cautious when having business dealings with people in any other country. Only because it can be difficult to impossible to pursue them to get your money back or to prosecute them.
Have a frequent credit check done or invest in a credit monitoring service to be on top of it in case someone opens an account in your name, or you see charges that you did not incur.
Go to LooksTooGoodToBeTrue.com and then to ‘types of fraud’/'job scams’, to read the US take on this from our Federal Trade Commission. This is another address for the Internet Fraud Complaint Unit of the FBI. Check it out - it also has the descriptons of other types of fraud you will encounter on the internet.
Keeps getting worse in my mind, where you could even be laundering money for a terrorist organization and not know it…
About the Author
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Patricia Brucoli is an experienced internet marketer and
mentor. Find a Legitimate Work at Home Business
http://www.the3rdpartynetx.com/
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