Most of the commenters were people who were considering taking such a job, but once they became better informed, decided against it. But some of them unfortunately had taken such a job and ended up in the middle of a very large mess. They found themselves holding the bag when all of the paper trails led to them. Not a good place to be when all you were trying to do is make a little money to support yourself without hurting anyone else.

I found a good resource for anyone who finds himself in a similar situation. It’s a section over at FraudAid.com that goes over the best things to do to protect your good name, avoid jail, and get on with your life if this happens to you. So if this is happening to you or someone you care about, thoroughly read The Fraud Victim’s Manual.

Fraud Aid is a non-profit victim advocacy organization, and they have some great information on their site. If you’re looking for a home job, it might be a good idea to bookmark it.

It has been a week or so since I got one of those, so I’m hoping that the culprits have been discovered. But someone else could easily do the same thing. So it’s up to us to remain vigilant in avoiding such scams.

If you get such an email, some red flags to look for include:

• The email comes from a site that you are sure you haven’t posted your resume on.
• The job description is vague.
• A job is offered before you’ve even had any contact with the employer. A good resume can help you get a job, but few legitimate employers will offer someone a job without an interview no matter how great the resume is.
• It sounds too good to be true.

Since I didn’t investigate, I’m not sure what the purpose of these emails was. It could have been an offer for a payment processing job or some other questionable position, a phishing scheme, or a vehicle for links to a malicious website. But whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good.

Somehow the resources got lost in the shuffle when I moved my blog over here from Blogspot. But my blog over there is still up, so I went over there and grabbed them. Now they are in the sidebar for your convenience.

There’s a scam forum that you can visit to read about others’ experiences and ask questions, some government sites, and a couple more good resources. If I find more, I’ll add them. And if you find any good ones, drop me a comment and I’ll have a look and possibly share them.

Entrepreneur is one of the biggest names in small business. They have a website chock full of information for those who are looking to start a business, whether it’s online, offline, from home or bricks and mortar. I’ve benefited greatly from the site as well as their print magazine. I think my readers will find these comprehensive guides to be a great value. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be linking to them.

More advertisements may or may not follow. If they do, they will be carefully selected as well.

Edited to add: I also added Mom’s Talk Biz. They have some great stuff to help you get started working from home, including some free reports and email lists. So check them out!

I haven’t been actively searching for jobs or gigs online for a long time, so I haven’t run across any scams to speak of on my own. And due to the way things have been at home (long story), I haven’t had the time to do much research. I considered selling this blog due to not having the time to update it regularly, but I just can’t do that. This is my labor of love, my gift to those who are struggling to get started in the world of work-at-homedom.

So I’m going to try to get back into posting again. I’m not going to make any guarantees about how often I will write new stuff, but I’m going to do the best I can to start updating fairly regularly. This is too important of a subject to me to let go.

Now, on to business. I’ve been getting some scam emails that are quite clever lately, and I thought it would be worthwhile to post some of them here even though most of them are not business-related. Scammers and spammers often get email addresses from websites, and those who are in business online are frequent targets. Here are some of the types of scam emails I’ve been receiving, in no particular order.

• Scare Tactics - I got one today that just took the cake, and it is what prompted me to write this. The subject line said, “dude, what if your wife finds this?” and the body read “OMG, what are you doing man. This video of you is all over the net. check it out yourself”, followed by what read as a YouTube link. But when mousing over the link, it was revealed that it went to a different website, with an IP instead of a www address.

  Now, I am not a man and I don’t have a wife. But if I were, this just might have scared me into looking. Even if I knew I had done nothing wrong, with some creative editing pictures and videos can be made to look like something they’re not. Clever.

• eCards - I’ve been getting a lot of notifications that someone has sent me an ecard. The casual observer could easily mistake these for being legit, but there are some red flags to look for. First of all, instead of including the sender’s name, they usually say a friend, neighbor, family member, or coworker has sent you a greeting. And while the link says that it goes to a major ecard site such as Blue Mountain or Hallmark, a mouseover will tell you that it does not.

• Nonsense Words for Subjects - This tactic is used to get around spam filters, and in my case it has been working quite well. Spam filters are getting smarter about those emails that use unrelated, rambling subject lines. So spammers have begun to use one word that isn’t really a word, such as “suntouryl” or “pafhinjat” as a subject.

These types of emails, including the ones that look like spam, often have links that end up leading to a malicious website. By clicking on them, you expose yourself to the risk of getting a Trojan horse, virus, or other bad stuff on your computer. If you get anything like these, just delete it. And if you don’t have a virus scanner that scans email messages and their attachments as they come in, get AVG for free. It’s the one I use, and it does a great job. Just remember that even the best email scanner won’t scan the websites that an email links to.

After inspecting a few of them and finding that the attached emails were spam, I got worried. I thought that despite all of my efforts to keep my computer secure and free of junkware, it had still somehow become a spam zombie. For those who haven’t heard that term, it’s a computer that has been infected by a virus or trojan that causes it to send junk mail on the infector’s behalf.

So of course I decided to investigate. Come to find out, it is just a new kind of spam. Spammers send spam emails to addresses that do not exist, with your email address in the reply-to field. Then the spam bounces back to you. This causes it to bypass most spam filters. Many Internet users, such as myself, will be curious as to what this mysterious bounced email is, and read the attachments.

If you get email like this, do not open the attachments. If they contain images, they can let the spammer know that your email address is in fact valid, and you will in turn get more spam.

It blows my mind the lengths that spammers go to in order to find new ways to get their junk mail out. I just don’t get it. I know that I totally ignore anything that reeks of spam, as do most other email users I know. There must be people out there that are making it worth their while, or they wouldn’t continue. Don’t be one of those people.

Spam comes in many forms, about many subjects. A substantial amount of it is trying to sell prescription drugs and other such spam-typical stuff. But there’s also plenty of it pertaining to work at home jobs. Please don’t give anyone who sends you unsolicited email the time of day. If they had something wonderful to offer, they wouldn’t have to use illegal and unethical means to get people’s attention.

There are plenty of methods available to block spam. Many virus scanners come packaged with spam blocking software. My ISP includes it with my Internet service so that most of it never even reaches my inbox. If you get mail from your website, there should be measures in place from your hosting provider that you can utilize to reduce spam.

If you still have spam getting through, check out SpamCop.net. It takes the guesswork out of reporting spam. You can register for free, and then when you get spam you can put the headers and body of the message into a form on their site. They then put together a report and send it to everyone that needs to know about it for you.

As with any work at home opportunity, however, there are pitfalls that you need to watch out for when purchasing a website. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: Let’s say a website owner has been running a site successfully for some time, and has the web statistics to prove it. Maybe they’re selling candles. Then out of the blue they cease to ship products that have been paid for. Angry customers start spreading the word, and soon they have no customers. In an attempt to get money out of the site one last time, they decide to sell the site to some unsuspecting work at home parent.

That’s just one example. Unless you have intimate knowledge of the website you are looking to buy, it’s hard to know just what incentive the owner has to sell it. So it is absolutely vital to do as much research as possible before you fork over the bucks. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Search Google for the site’s name and URL, and for the name of the present owner. Go through at least the first 10 pages (if that many results are listed) with a fine-toothed comb. Look for any complaints about the site, company, or business owner.
• Search Technorati for the same items, and for terms related to the site. Blogs are an excellent source of information from disgruntled customers.
• Check scam forums, and forums related to the site’s topics. They are another common place to find complaints.
• Don’t rely on statistics provided by the site owner. Even third-party measurements, such as Google pagerank and Alexa ranking, can be manipulated to make a site look more popular than it is. You could ask for screenshots of, or links to, their stat software, or copies of their log files. To find out who else is linking to the site, just do a Google search for “link:http://www.siteaddress.com” without the quotes.
• Check the site’s whois information and make sure there’s nothing fishy about it. Whois lists the name and address of who the site is registered to, as well as how long the domain has been registered. Compare it with the info given by the seller.

If you do decide to buy, keep records of all communications between yourself and the seller. This is vital in case they don’t deliver.

Owning a website is a great option for work at home parents, and getting your hands on one that is already well established can save you a lot of hard work. Just be sure you know as much as you possibly can about the history of the site before you spend your money on it, and it could prove to be a very worthy investment.

Use caution when considering these, just as you would with any other business opportunities. It sounds like easy money with a legitimate investment, but it’s quite possible that many of these deals could be too good to be true. I have heard horror stories about people who ordered and paid for their kiosks, only to receive faulty equipment and no support for it.

Are there legitimate kiosk companies? I’m sure there are. I can’t say that I know from experience, because I’ve never had the cash to invest in them to find out. But as always, you must do your homework before giving them your hard-earned cash. Check them out with the BBB, and do general online searches of the company’s name and the names of people at the top. I have also heard tales of the companies giving prospective buyers names of supposed satisfied customers as references, only for them to turn out to be paid to sell you on it. So seek out opinions on your own if at all possible.