"Work at Home for Google" Fake News Scams

According to experts, the number of employment scams are proportioned to the level of unemployment, according to one expert on a 20/20 program on internet job fraud estimates that 54 out or 55 job offers are deceptive or outright scams.

One example that has saturated the web since perhaps mid 2009 is the Work at Home for Google advertisement that is designed to look like a news report, complete with a fake newspaper name in the page header. Google is suing 50 companies for practicing this particular deception mis-using the Google trade mark. The court papers detail the typical scam, involving false testimonials of high pay for "posting links", a task Google does not actually hire people to do.

One current version of this scam describes the example work at home mom's part time earnings of $6000 a month, but inexplicably shows a photo of a $32,000 check from Google. Those who buy the story may end up paying about $2 for an information packet, only to discover an additional $50 - $79 has been charged to their credit card, for which they may receive some useless information. Additional details of the Work at Home for Google scam lawsuit.

One of the most costly scams, detailed in a 20/20 report involved a variation of Nigerian check fraud, in which a woman was hired over the internet to act as a payment processor, she was told to pick up a check writing kit from a specific local office supply store. The checks she wrote and mailed out, like her own pay check were drawn from a fraudulent bank account, she was held financially and criminally liable for her actions.

Other job scams include paid employer lists that you can find elsewhere for free, employers who who simply don't pay for work delivered, (there are shady pay to surf companies with an artificially high $1000 min payout level I'm guessing people never reach).

There are a number of businesses that don't commit outright theft, but end up being unprofitable for the majority of users, these may include "Turnkey" web site businesses, MLM (pyramid) marketing schemes and get rich training programs.

The work for Google scam is relatively tame, just extracting a relatively small amount from your credit card, it's one worth mentioning due to it's blatent...Any job opportunity that requires the worker to pay for information, training or even shipping charges, which is standard procedure for a fraudulent operation, should be viewed with suspicion.

There are some tools you can employ to protect yourself, one of the most valuable being your common sense. Don't be greedy, if an offer seems "too good to be true" it probably is, particularly light of the fact that many online jobs are available to a worldwide talent pool, including people with a substantially lower cost of living than north American's.

When considering getting involved with an online company, one of the first things you will want to do is to Google the company or web site name, scan the results for complaints or scam reports, some career building products are marketed by thousands of affiliates who's messages will have a similar pattern, their practice of including the attention getting term Scam in their sales message can obscure real scam reports in the search results.

A business web site can be examined for authenticity in a similar fashion to an online store. Examine the domain name's WHOIS information which normally gives the name address and phone number of the domain owner, in some cases the displayed info will be for a confidential registration service which conceals the identity of the owner, an understandable for a home business that wants to protect their home address, but a major business concealing it's ownership should be viewed with suspicion. The creation date of a domain is given in the WHOIS data, may be used to calculate the age of the company, anything less than a year old should be dealt with cautiously, since it's too young to have accumulated much of a fraud record.

An open business will provide a phone number and mailing address in the web site's contact page. This may be compared with the domain WHOIS info.