HispanicBusiness

Work-at-home jobs sound appealing: no commuting, no dressing up for work, being your own boss. And, according to the e-mail advertisements going around, these jobs offer good pay without requiring new training -- or much actual work, for that matter.

But are they legitimate jobs? As part of the Watchdog: Your Next Job project, the Watchdog looked into how to tell the difference between work-at-home scams and real employment opportunities.

The Scams

Lynette Valdez, of Westbrook, Minn., thought that when she gave Pacific Webworks her debit card number last year, it was just for a $1.99 shipping and handling fee to get information about an at-home business offer supposedly connected with Google. But before long, she noticed two mysterious charges of $59.99 each on her card.

"They took money out of my checking account twice, and I had to fight to get it back," she said. "That's a big amount of money for me."

Like most work-at-home scams, advertisements for them rely on a grain of truth and depend on the recipients' willingness to believe the grandiose claims, said Minnesota attorney general's office spokesman Ben Wogsland. With the state's highest unemployment rate in 25 years, he said, "there are so many people who are desperate, who are vulnerable."

So beware. You may be attracted by offers for these jobs that seem cheap or easy. But buried in the "terms and conditions" is the fine print allowing scamsters to tap into your bank account. Or

the job might be misrepresented. You may think you'll be stuffing envelopes, for example, but in reality, there are no envelopes involved: You can only make money by recruiting other people to participate. This is known as a pyramid scheme.

If the language in the advertisement makes the job sound preposterously easy -- "Make money quick and easy at your kitchen table in your underwear," for example -- it's probably too good to be true. If the ad only talks about your pipe dreams and doesn't tell you what kind of work it is -- other than it's lucrative -- that's also a bad sign. And you also shouldn't have to pay for information about a legitimate job, although you may have to pay for training.

To boost their credibility, some scam e-mail advertisements contain phrases like "as seen on" with logos of news organizations, such as ABC-TV. Some show what look like regular newspaper stories supporting their product -- only the newspaper that's named doesn't exist.

Sometimes, to stay on the good side of the law, the ads will contain lines that say something like, "We are not a partner, affiliate, or licensee of (a large company) nor is our company in any other way formally associated with it." The word "advertisement" should appear somewhere on the page.

Often, the terms and conditions in these ads tend to be very long, very difficult to understand and skewed to benefit the company. It may say, for example, that in the event of a dispute, you can never sue the company -- but that in some cases, the company can sue you. Or it may spell out that you're on the hook for continuing monthly charges, not just the shipping charge for the "free" kit.

Finally, some advertisements arrive as e-mail and claim to be warnings of all the scams out there -- but they themselves then recommend work-at-home schemes that are guilty of the same rags-to-riches rhetoric.

The Watchdog's favorite scam of the moment features an ad of a young man in jeans stretched out on a deck, one hand behind his head and the other resting on his chest. About a foot away is a laptop, sitting untouched. He's wearing sunglasses and appears to be dozing. The advertisement reads: "Work from home. Never set an alarm clock again. Make a fortune while being your own boss." And as if to legitimize this pie-in-the-sky scenario, the ad contains the famous Google logo and says, "Earn up to $250 to $943 per day using Google."