Work From Home Jobs You Should Stay Away From

Working from home is a situation that many people wish they could be in. If you’re a mother, it can be ideal since for many work from home jobs, you can essentially make your own hours and have plenty of quality time for your kids. However, some of the time, these types of jobs can be too good to be true and end up being scams.

Here are five work from home jobs you should stay away from:

1. Envelope Stuffing

This is one of the most classic examples of a job being too good to be true – which it often is. After all, why would a company pay you to stuff an envelope when they could just do it by machine for way less than they’d pay you?

2. Online Surveys

This one is alluring because companies pay you for consumer research – who doesn’t like to give their honest opinion about something and get paid for it?! However, the amount of time spent in either finding or completing the surveys makes you less than minimum wage and many companies won’t pay you until you earn a certain amount. Oftentimes, you’ll end up quitting before earning that minimum amount. It’s just not worth it.

3. Medical Billing

The fact that they claim they will pay for your services as a medical biller even without any experience should be the first sign you should run for the hills with this one. Also, they promise to find you clients, but you also have to pay for the software (which most don’t have), training and even the technical support.

4. Data Entry

There are a ton of legitimate data entry jobs, however there are a lot of sketchy employers who only want to cheat those working from home out of major money. Most of these employers will find willing workers and then tell them they need certain software in order to do the work. No one actually has this software, so the company will charge thousands of dollars for it but that’s okay – you’ll be making the money back right away, they say. After paying them for the software, the job never actually happens.

5. Wiring Money

Anything that has to do with wiring money or cashing checks should automatically raise a red flag. The pretense for the scam is usually different. Bottom line: never cash checks for anyone you don’t know.

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