What Really Happens When You Sign up for One of These Work From Home Scams
We’ve all seen ads like “Make $ 2,000 a week working from home” or, ahem, “Start working from home with Google…” but have you ever wondered what happens when you actually try to sign up for one of these programs? Planet Money figured it out.
First things first. In most cases, work from home scams are almost always about “helping” you start your own online business. In other words, surprise, you can’t just sit in your underwear and surf the Internet all day. I assume you can see where this is heading, but here is Planet Money on how it usually plays out:
This is how it works. When you reply to one of these ads, you give them your name and your contact information. Then someone from the call center calls you and says that you want to work from home …
Do you want to create a website? They can build it for you. They will teach you how to run a web business, process all documents, keep records …
Sure, this is actually either a terrible website or nothing at all, but it’s good when they get a ton of money from someone. The entire scam follows a very specific scenario that establishes a rapport with the person before extracting the credit card number. This is a pretty obvious scam and surprisingly it actually works. However, even if you think you are good at this sort of thing, Planet Money has a ton of sales tactics that apply to more than just work from home scams that are worth looking out for.
Anatomy of a Fraud | Planet Money