Live Your Dream - Start a Legitimate Work from Home Business

Who doesn't dream of owning a profitable and successful work from home business? The opportunities are certainly out there but the problem is finding the legitimate ones. The Internet, television, radio, and even the newspapers these days are filled with ad after ad promising to show you how to make thousands each week while working from home. Unfortunately, most of these ads are selling little more than hope because the businesses will never amount to anything legitimate. Here are the top five scams being used by con artists and shady businesses in the work from home genre:
Crafts
Envelope Stuffing
Computer Scams
Medical Billing
Pyramid Schemes
Do you like tearing things apart and putting them back together again? Home-based production business opportunities allow people to produce clothes and other products in their homes that are then sold to companies for profit. While this all sounds lovely in theory, it is actually the common sales pitch to promote the home assembly scam and is particularly alluring for older persons nearing retirement and in need of extra income. The whole point of this is to get the investor to purchase costly equipment and materials. Even if you invested the money and started making the products precisely to company specs, they still can refuse to buy them from you using quality control excuses. The point was to sell you the equipment--not buy your products.
As you probably already know, the envelope stuffing work from home venture is another scam. Most are stunned when they realize the catch in this classic small business scam. Investors place their own envelope stuffing ads in order to make their money back. It never had anything to do with envelope stuffing! This self-perpetuating scam forces people to scam other people in order to get their investment back.
Con artists have also created a lot of scams to try and capitalize on the fact that so many people now have a computer and Internet connection. While there are literally thousands of various computer-related scams floating around out there, the most common are those promising you money with some sort of data entry or word processing work. To actually learn how and where to get started so you can make money, you will first need to pay some kind of fee for the information. In return, the investor will likely get some long-winded report about all the opportunities out there, but nothing they can actually use to earn a living. Full of hype and big promises, these computer scams never amount to any legitimate work from home business and ultimately waste only time, money, and effort.
Now there is definitely a true shortage of health care works, and scam artists are out there promising to help teach you how to start a small business that will capitalize on this shortage and make you a small fortune. Promising to teach you how to start small businesses in medical billing and even electronic insurance claim processing, these companies appear to be selling a legitimate service aimed at filling a true market need. Appearing completely legitimate and even having a real customer service department, these programs can cost the investor thousands.
The money would be well spent if the investor actually had a viable and profitable medical billing operation at the end of the program but this is very rarely the case. Attaining contracts with health care providers is so difficult that even the FTC has issued warnings to consumers about medical billing home based business programs. Success is such a low probability with these home based medical billing programs that they should be considered as scams by anyone looking to hold on to their money.
Without question, the pyramid scheme is still the most common scam in the home based business category. These scams all promise to make you a distributor so that you earn a commission from your sales plus that of anyone you bring in under you. With real products, a real office, and the semblance of a corporate structure, these scams can be very alluring to the unwitting investor. The office, products, and corporate props all exist to disguise the MLM and help convince investors that the company is a legitimate opportunity for them. Pyramids are doomed to failure, illegal, and will never make the average investor any real money.
It is important to remember that we have only covered the most common home business schemes on the market right now. There seems no end to the number of variations and new scams that appear daily on the market. We have never seen such a proliferation of scams in our lifetime. but history has never recorded so many legitimate small business opportunities either! The trick is avoiding the scams while identifying the good ones.
Hello, my name is Syd Stewart and I have been running my own business for nearly twenty five years. I have authored 'How to Build a Great Small Business', a evolutionary handbook for budding and existing small business owners..See http://Smilingowner.com
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