Work from home scams Work from home scams explained

Scammers offer you a 'quick way to make lots of money from home'

In times of economic difficulty, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) says it expects a rise in work from home scams, as people look for new ways to make money.

Work from home scams generally offer you a quick way to make a lot of money from home, without needing any qualifications or skills.

You often have to pay money to scammers in the form of a registration fee or to buy goods. It then turns out that there either is no work or that you can’t make any money.

Types of work from home scams

There are a number of different work from home scams:

• Buying products to sell on, only for you to find that there is no market.
• Making products which are repeatedly returned for being ‘substandard’. You may have to pay hidden costs such as advertising, photocopying and work for many hours without pay.
• Alternatively the scam is that there’s no real work – you earn commission for recruiting others. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has previously ruled against a number of companies advertising work from home scams like this.

How to spot work from home scams

Advertisements for work from home scams frequently appear in situations vacant or recruitment columns in newspapers. Work from home scams can also be found advertised in shop windows.

Key things to look out for:

• The scammers won’t tell you what work you will be doing in any kind of detail – they’ll keep it vague.
• You are asked to pay money upfront for a starter pack or kit.
• They’ll advertise high earnings for comparatively little work.

We investigated an envelope stuffing scam

Envelope-stuffing work from home scam

One work from home scam we found online said we could earn £1.60 for every envelope we stuffed if we sent scammers £49.99 for a starter pack. 

A quick check of the ASA website revealed what we’d actually be doing is placing adverts asking people to write to us for further information on envelope work – effectively recruiting others to do exactly what we were doing.

Key things that rang alarm bells about this scam were that we weren’t told what we’d be putting in the envelopes and we had to pay up front.

The ASA ruled it was a pyramid scheme and illegal under the Consumer Protection Regulations 2008. 

The ASA says it regularly advises newspapers to tighten up on their checking procedures when accepting advertisements, in order to avoid work from home scams.