Scammed: Why Can’t I Find Legitimate Work At Home Jobs?

There’s no shame in being scammed. It happens to everyone. It may seem like ripping the scammers tongue out is too kind for them. But there are some options you have to make things right.

There is a story about a man in Denver who just graduated from college and needed work. He couldn’t find employment anywhere, and decided to work at home with an online company that specialized in data entry. He was a smart guy, but admittedly gullible to the point where he believed everyone on their word, no matter how often he got burned.

He signed on with a data entry service that charged him a monthly fee of $10.00. Since he’d never had a work at home job, he couldn’t tell if that was the norm, so he paid it. He set up a direct debit with them so the fee could be taken out of his account every month.

He was sent an email with a list of data he needed to enter into a template he had to download, and was paid $.05 per page of entered data. This originally sounded good to him. But, he’d spent almost $80,000 to get his degree and after doing math wound up making a whopping $1.00 every twenty pages.

However, that $.05 per page was reset after each assignment, which had a maximum page count of 8 or 9. That meant that if he worked all day, which he did, he made about $5.25. And each month, when they took out their fee, it made a real difference. Also, when he quit the company continued withdrawing money from his bank account.

This is not uncommon. When you take a job you need to be especially careful of scams like this one that have you doing too much work for almost no money. What can you do when that happens? First and foremost, if you can’t find any information about a company online then don’t take the job. Let someone else do the dirty work; let them get hoodwinked first.

It sounds mean, but why should you take the fall? You can’t afford to get scammed, so don’t be “that guy”. The other thing you can do is report it on sites that specialize in work from home scams. There are blogs you can post your comments or complaints on about any job you’ve been bamboozled by. Unfortunately there is hardly any legal recourse for you. Once it’s happened, it’s happened. The reality is, once you’ve been swindled, you can’t be un-swindled. It happened; now move on to a good job.

Many work at home jobs are sometimes thought of as low-end employment. That’s not the case. There are real jobs and real careers out there for hard workers with the proper experience. Just because you got scammed once doesn’t mean it has to happen again. A rule of thumb is to never give out any personal financial information to anyone over the internet for a work at home position. PayPal payments are usually a sure indicator that the employer is legit. So, take a breath, step back and then move forward with your new work from home position.