Follow the money trail...

I used to watch the Wizard of Oz growing up, and can still sing (as I imagine most Americans can) "Follow the Yellow Brick Road." But in this case, it is "Follow the Money Trail." Not quite as catchy, but much more applicable.

I hate scammers. Honestly, I just don't understand them. I have been talking about this a lot on here lately, but it's because this sort of thing strikes close to home, being in the work-from-home field like I am. It seems like almost every WAHM job out there is a scam. Luckily, the ratio isn't quite that high, but it is pretty out of whack.

One favorite is the scam where they post an ad, telling you that you are going to make $300-500 per week doing data entry from home. You don't need any training, they will train you online to do it, and all you need is to be honest and hard-working. They throw that in there hoping to throw you off the trail. After all, a scammer wouldn't be advertising for an honest and hard-working person. This must be legit! Another favorite is a constant harping on being a stay-at-home mom themselves, or being a Christian. A really smart scammer (or just one wanting to cover all of his/her bases) will include all three in their ad. You respond to the ad, happy at the thought of making $300-500 a week working part-time at a really flexible job, and the scammer replies telling you that in order to make sure that you are really excited and serious about this job, they are going to charge you a small processing fee. Truly, they don't want to do this, but they are forced to, because it costs them so much time and money and energy to have people ask for the job info and then never actually complete the job. They want to make sure you really want to do this. They are only going to charge you $5 or $10 or $20 for this information, but at $300-$500 a week, you can make that back in a day, very easily. I have even seen the ads go as high as $30. They stress that this is of course only a one time payment, but once you pay it, you don't get your money back.

You pay them your money, and in return, you get an e-mail with a Word document attached. It tells you in the document that the data entry job that you just paid money for is simply that you take the ad that you just responded to, and post it yourself all over the internet. You are entering data, yes, and now you are going to make money off the poor, unsuspecting souls who were as naive as you to take the bait. Isn't that just lovely? Simply marvelous.

I think that this scam started out with one person, posting this ad all over. Out of 100 people who took the bait and paid the money, 98 of them are upset and furious, but having no recourse, lick their wounds and slink away. 2 of them think well, I need to recoup the money that I spent, I better post this ad and at least get my money back. But then the money starts rolling in and the 2 people decide that instead, they are going to continue their scam. You now have 3 people posting these ads all over the place, and just a couple of their respondents think hey, I need to make my money back at least. The cycle just continues ad nauseum until now, if you go onto job boards like Craigs List, you will find 20-30 of these ads posted every single day, in every part of the country. It is like a bad disease that is spreading rapidly.

The medicine? Knowledge. Don't ever spend money to get a job. Follow the money trail. If the company makes their money off of you, the employee, instead of the client, then you have just unwittingly become the client. And if you are the client, then that means you just got scammed.

So the next time you are haunting the job boards, looking for the perfect job, remember as you read the listings: You've got the follow the money trail. It will never lie to you. I wish to heaven I could say the same thing about people.

Havs