Con artists often use the Internet to advertise supposed business opportunities that allow individuals to earn thousands of dollars a month in "work-at-home" ventures. These schemes typically require the individuals to pay nominal to substantial sums for the "business plans" or other materials. The fraudsters then fail to deliver the promised materials, provide inadequate information to make a viable business, or provide information readily available for free or a substantially lower cost elsewhere.
In one such scheme, after paying a registration fee the victim will be sent advice on how to place ads, similar to the one that recruited him, in order to recruit others. This is a form of Ponzi scheme.
Another work-at-home scam involves kits for smalldoodads such as CD cases to be assembled by the victim in their home. The victim pays a fee for the kit, but after assembling and returning the item, the scammer rejects it as substandard, refusing to reimburse the victim for the cost of the kit. Variations on this scam include work on directories,stuffing envelopes, doing medical billing or data entry,reading books,and even translating documents from the victim's native tongue into English.
This scheme is prevalent in the Philippines,they are using fictional names in a same default,fictional area,named "Bagumbayan".
Work-at-home donation processing
An elaborate variation on this theme lures the victim with an e-mailed job offer from a fake company. The scammer may have constructed an elaborate website for the company, to make the offer appear legitimate. The job offer includes an unrealistically generous salary for part-time, unskilled labor. The main responsibility of this well-paying job is to be a middleman for "donations", supposedly intended for victims of a natural disaster.
The scammer then asks the victim for their bank account numbers, allegedly to deposit donations into the victim's account so that the victim can redistribute them. As part of the "hiring process", the fraudster also asks for the victim's Social Security number and date of birth.
With this information, the criminal monitors the victim's account balances. When a larger-than-normal amount appears in the bank account, such as a paycheck, the scammer drains the account.
Generally, the faked company website will locate the company in a different country from the scammer; this may be noticeable by inspecting the domain registration for the website, which may indicate the scammer's true country of origin. In addition, victims in Western countries are targeted using a Western-sounding pseudonym like "Timothy Scott", while the domain name tgilberthome.org is actually registered to a "Li Xiang".
A recent work at home scam comes from exploiting unemployed people. A job is offered to work at home, with the fraudster claiming to represent a real corporation. He sets up an instant messenger interview usually over yahoo. There he tells the person that they are hired, and will receive high pay and full benefits. They must purchase bookkeeping software to work there, for around six hundred dollars. This money must be paid via western union. Of course the fraudster keeps the money, and there is no real job. Victims have called the company afterwards, but the fraudster never actually worked for or represented the company.
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