CONSUMER ADVOCATE REPORT
HOME BASED BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, January ISSUE, 2009
With the increase in lost jobs and the increase in energy costs, more Americans are looking for a home based business opportunity. Unfortunately, many consumers in search of work at home become victims to online scams.
The Better Business Review, has been helping American consumers stay informed and avoid common scams. We have been successful in helping consumers because we listen. We rely on the feedback of everyday hard working people to keep us up to date on the most recent scams and most reliable online businesses. When consumers report to us, The Better Business Review, we investigate. The results of our investigations can be read below in our CONSUMER ADVOCATE REPORT.
We encourage anybody who suspects an online home based business scam to report it to us. We will have our consumer advocate team investigate. The results of these investigations will be used for upcoming consumer advocate reports.
HOME BASED BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES; JANUARY ISSUE 2009
The report is based on information from the following; consumer reports, consumer interviews, FTC (Federal Trade Commission), BBB (Better Business Bureau) and our other investigations. We have focused on 3 scam alerts and 5 legitimate offers, that we feel are most relevant for consumers at this time.
CONSUMER ADVOCATE REPORT
Scam Alerts:
SCAM ALERT 1: EMAIL PROCESSING
SCAM ALERT 2: STUFFING ENVELOPES / MAILING CIRCULARS
SCAM ALERT 3: CHAIN LETTERS
Legitimate Free Information Websites:
We have selected 5 websites that offer free information about work at home businesses. (The Better Business review only provides links to companies that are both free and reliable).
SCAM ALERT 1: EMAIL PROCESSING
Email Processing offers are not what they first appear to be. Advertisements state that you can get paid between $5 - $30 for every email that you process. many companies state that by paying for their email processing program they will connect you with companies that need people to work from home and respond, (process) their emails.
Sounds easy enough. Simply pay a small fee and then learn how to sit back and make a living answering emails from your home.
Unfortunately no. This is not what happens. This is how “Email Processing” jobs really work:
You pay to learn that in order to make money as an email processor you need to get other people to become email processors. As far as our investigation took us, we never found a single company that is hiring people to process their email. We really do not like this scam, because not only does it trick and deceive people, it encourages good people to do bad.
SCAM ALERT 2: STUFFING ENVELOPES, MAILING CIRCULARS
The Stuffing Envelopes or Mailing Circulars scam has been around for a long time, well before the Internet. But like all good schemes, it is now thriving online, wasting the time and money of many consumers.
You may see an advertisement stating that you can make considerable amounts of money by simply stuffing envelopes. The advertisement will request that you pay for their "start up" kit which will contain everything you need to be successful.
We tested several popular such companies. Despite many variations to this scheme they all fail. The reason they fail is because the stuffing envelopes program has you purchase a data list of people and then pay to send letters, (stuffed envelopes) to the hundreds of people on your list. You are sending these people promotional offers, or like with the email processing, you are just trying to recruit more envelope stuffers.These costs along with the costs to purchase the program start kit, are never recovered, and you will have spent hours stuffing envelopes that never get a response.
These companies are highly deceptive because they know that it takes a very large amount of time and cost to send out 500 envelopes. They also know that if you are lucky, at best you might get 1-2 responses, earning considerably less than you have spent.
SCAM ALERT 3: CHAIN LETTERS / PRYRAMID SCHEMES
Most everyone has been the recipient of a chain letter which promised riches if perpetuated. As obvious is this may seem to many, this is still one of the most common and successful schemes around.
Chain letter schemes urge mail and now e-mail recipients to send a small amount of money or token valuable to a list of several people, remove one name, add their own and forward the e-mail in bulk to others. Theoretically, the participants will start to receive money as other, "downstream" recipients receive the e-mail and participate.
Chain letters are simply low payment pyramid schemes in an envelope, so, like them, they make money only for the first few on the list. All the others lose their money.
That's why pyramids and chain letters deceive consumers and are illegal under state and federal laws. Economists have estimated that about 95% of pyramid participants lose their money.
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Copyright 2009, Better Business Review.
Legitimate Free Information Websites:
We have selected 5 websites that offer free information about work at home businesses. The 5 websites below meet each of our 5 requirements.
Requirements for a Legitimate Information website:
1. Free information. No up front fees.
2. Clean record with FCC & BBB
3. Information adds value to consumers.
4. No deception.
5. Responsive & courteous.
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