Work from home (fraud)

Not to be confused with remote work from home - a legitimate way to earn money.

A work-at-home scheme is a get-rich-quick scheme in which the victim is lured by the opportunity to work from the comfort of their home, doing easy work, and getting the most money for the least amount of time spent. The real purpose of the job-scammer is to extort money from the victim by charging fees to start a job or forcing the victim to invest in overpriced products. The scammer does not always act as an employer, he can be a seller of information about vacancies at home.

The bulk of such offers are distributed via the Internet, as it is a cheap means of attracting the target audience, leaving the false employer the opportunity to remain anonymous. On the Internet, a potential victim has much less opportunity to check the legality of a job offer.

The first type of work-from-home scam was the so-called “envelope stuffing”, which appeared during the Great Depression in the United States. It began with the fact that the potential victim received a letter with a leaflet enclosed in it. The flyer said she could get a job filling envelopes, earning $2 for each envelope filled and mailed. To get the job, you had to send $2 to the sender of the leaflet. In response, the victim received a letter with instructions offering to earn money by sending similar letters.

Some countries are fighting against such schemes. In 2006, in the United States, at the initiative of the Federal Trade Commission, the False Hope Project (eng. Project FAL$E HOPE$) was launched, one of whose tasks is to combat work-from-home schemes. More than 100 enforcement actions have been completed under this project by the Federal Trade Commission, the US Department of Justice, the United States Postal Service, and legal agencies in eleven states. However, in the following year 2007, 2.5 million Americans (roughly 1% of the nation's population) were victims of such scams, many of them repeated.

Legitimate work from home does exist, and many people work from the comfort of their own homes. But everyone who is looking for such an opportunity should be careful about the selection of proposals. The danger lies in the extremely high prevalence of fraudulent offers, as evidenced, for example, by a study conducted in the United States in 2009, according to which only one offer of work from home out of 42 was found to be legitimate. Most legitimate jobs required some kind of extracurricular education, such as a university or vocational school diploma, a certificate, and also required work experience. In addition, many legitimate work-from-home vacancies did not involve pure work from home: it was required to spend some time in the office. Another study of 5,000 offers by Staffcentrix found a 1 in 54 ratio of legitimate offers to fraudulent offers.

Types of work-from-home offers

The list of possible job offers from home is not fixed once and for all. When some work-from-home offers don't work, scammers come up with new ones. This article discusses some typical fraudulent offers.

Hand work

In one of the most common types of fraud, the victim is asked to do manual work at home. This is the work of manufacturing industrial products: candles, buttons, cufflinks, mosaics, medical equipment, toys, sanitary ware, accessories, and so on. Often the entire production process is reduced to the simplest operations to create products from materials provided by the employer. The most common of these schemes are sealing or filling envelopes, cutting labels, sticking or cutting stamps, assembling stationery (most often pens), wrapping gifts, and the like. There are schemes where obviously meaningless work is offered, for example, sorting beads by color. A common feature of all such schemes is the requirement to pay for something before starting work. The victim may be charged money as a deposit for materials, for training or instructions, for the delivery of materials, or as evidence of the “serious intentions” of the victim. The victim is informed that the money spent will be returned with the first salary / fee, or that they will quickly pay off. It is the receipt of this payment that is the purpose of the fraudster, he is not interested in the results of the work, that is, he does not need the produced goods. The cost of raw materials sold to the victim is often inflated. If the victim turns to the scammer in order to exchange products for money, then they will be told that the product does not meet all the requirements for it (or the company has temporary financial difficulties or something else of that kind) and will respond in this way all the time, no matter what no matter how good the product was, and no matter how many times the victim redid the work. It often happens that the fraudster hides without giving the victim the opportunity to turn in the goods produced, or even without providing the means of production for which he paid. The possibility of purchasing defective or stolen materials cannot be ruled out. As a result, the worker is left with the produced product and without a buyer.

Example

One of the scams offers a home-based job seeker to make candles at home. By calling the phone number listed in the ad, the victim gets the opportunity to listen to the answering machine message, which tells where and when to come to get this job. Those who come are told what the work is, and they are offered to undergo paid training, promising that a contract will be concluded. Further, the scammer really conducts training, after which he offers to sign an agreement, which only says that the applicant pays for the training that has already taken place, and does not say anything about guarantees of payment for future work. Once the contract is signed, the victim is charged for the materials needed to make the candles. After working for some time, the victim returns with ready-made candles, but she is told that the candles turned out to be defective and the work needs to be redone by buying new materials. The victim can redo the work several times, they can even accept part of the produced goods, but as a result it turns out that much more money is spent than earned.

Computer work

There are scams associated with working on a computer, including via the Internet. The meaning of such schemes can be quite diverse.

In one of the schemes, an easy money seeker is offered a job sorting electronic images. The potential victim is given instructions on how to sort the images (i.e. put the images into folders according to their subject), and is told that to get started, you need to send money for image disks and to pay for postage. After payment, the scammer breaks contact. The scheme with the search for information on the Internet operates in a similar way. The only difference is that instead of sorting images, the victim is required to search the Internet for information on some topic and you have to pay for a disk with instructions, not images.

There are schemes where the victim needs to perform some actions on the Internet. Different in essence, these schemes are united by the way the employer uses to avoid their pay obligations. These are pay-per-click schemes, participation in online surveys, and viewing spam. In online survey scams, a job seeker is invited to participate in one or more online surveys. In the spam view scheme, you earn money for reading promotional emails. In a pay-per-click scheme, the victim needs to browse sites linked to by the employer, who, in turn, receives money from the owners of these sites, who are interested in increasing their popularity. At the same time, the site owner is misled, because the influx of site visitors with this method of “promotion” is temporary, and the popularity does not really increase. For all these actions, the victim is credited with a salary to a virtual account. It is alleged that if the amount of money in the account is more than a certain amount, then the victim will be able to withdraw money from this account. However, it is not possible to withdraw money from this account, since such an opportunity was not initially provided for by the fraudulent employer. Money may simply not be credited, or accruals may be so small that the required amount will be unattainable. When approaching the required amount of accrual, the account itself can be reduced or blocked. In any case, one of these options or some combination of them will be involved. In this regard, a derivative form of fraud has developed - the sale of programs that supposedly allow you to withdraw money from your account. In addition to wasting time, the victim runs the risk that, when registering on the scammer's site, their email address will be included in the database of addresses for spam distribution.

Fraud with the spread of spam is similar in meaning to the scheme described at the beginning of the article with filling envelopes, where the role of regular mail is played by e-mail. The emailed instructions tell the job seeker to post advertisements on all online forums and sell those instructions to other victims.

The job of an operator of an electronic payment system (such as Webmoney), according to the advertisement, is to transfer the money received to the specified electronic account to another electronic account. The fraudulent employer will stop communicating after he receives the money that he requires from the victim as a guarantee of the seriousness of his intentions. The collection of such a payment is an integral part of many fraudulent schemes. These are, among other things, schemes where it is proposed to type text from audio files or scanned documents, translate text from a foreign language (the ad may say that knowing the language is not necessary for this, it will be enough to use an automatic translator and correct the style of the resulting text) or just correct the errors in the provided text. The requirement for a deposit may be explained by the fact that the company providing work suffers losses from unscrupulous employees who do not fulfill their obligations, therefore, it is forced to protect itself in this way. Unlike all of the above, home-based word processing job offers are not always scams.

There are schemes with home work on a computer, in which a fraudulent employer may be interested not only in the money of the victim, but also in the results of her work. In such schemes, the scammer tries to deceive freelancers: translators, copywriters, programmers, journalists, writers, and anyone whose work can be done remotely. The scammer may simply not pay, having received the results of the victim’s work, he may give the employee a test task (“Suddenly you are illiterate? We should test your skills!”) And disappear after receiving his results, or set an difficult condition for the employee and withhold part of the salary if it is not performed. It happens that a scammer who needs to do some work divides it into parts and distributes it among home job applicants, claiming that this is a test task necessary for hiring. After the victims, having completed the task, return the results of their work to the false employer, they are told that the work was done poorly, that the worker is “not suitable”, or something else of that kind. In this way, websites, books, articles, scripts for films, series and computer games, and so on can be created, it turns out that all the work was done by the victims, and the results of the work belong to the scammer, and the victims have no way to recover money for their work.

Example

One of the schemes is a proposal to colorize black and white drawings in a graphics editor. In order to get started, you need to pay for a disc with uncolored pictures. The victim will receive the disk, but she will not be paid for the work done - they may answer that she does not have a creative thought, that the work was done incorrectly, or they will not get in touch at all.

Another example

There are ads on the Internet that offer the applicant money for entering characters from pictures (captchas). In this case, the fraudster is interested in the results of his work - the introduction of captchas allows special programs to automatically register on sites for subsequent distribution of spam and viruses. As a rule, the victim does not receive money for his malicious activity. She may be paid very little or her account may be blocked without explanation.

Other schemes

There are schemes with work "on the phone". The job is to make phone calls to increase passive sales or sell a product or service that is difficult or impossible to sell. This is often associated with network marketing schemes. After the sale of the goods, the fraudulent employer disappears without paying wages and forcing the victim to deal with the deceived customers and law enforcement agencies on their own. The victim may also be charged a "per allocated number" or "per employee certificate" fee.

There is a scheme in which a job seeker is offered money for the fact that he, having received a parcel in the mail, will send it to the specified address. By forwarding the parcel, the victim becomes an accomplice in the crime, because such parcels contain stolen goods. In this case, the goal of the criminal is not to extort money, but to be able to move the stolen property in a safe way[8].

The most uncomplicated fraud is one in which the meaning of the work is not communicated to the victim at all. The ad says only that a certain organization allegedly offers a highly paid job at home and in order to get information about it, you need to transfer a certain amount to a certain account. The victim does not receive a response. In another variation of the scam, the victim is asked to call a toll-free phone number for "more information."

Job seekers from home may be offered to buy a list of home work vacancies. Usually this is a randomly compiled list of companies that do not need such workers at all or needed them once upon a time. Also, scammers may offer help in finding employment for such types of work or in creating their own business at home.

Home business

The victim may be offered so-called "business packages" (aka "complexes"), that is, ideas for starting a household business. The variety of business ideas is limited only by the imagination of the scammer, in particular, these can be ideas about making money on the Internet or technologies for home-based production of building materials, Persian carpets, glass processing, and so on. Usually the seller of such packages claims that out of altruistic motives ("Just tired of everything for himself - it's time for people.") to share a "valuable" idea with potential competitors, instead of earning money himself. The ad emphasizes in every possible way the effectiveness of a particular proposal in comparison with other similar ones (“I don’t want to brag, but different business packages, electronic textbooks - in general, everything that was offered to people on the Internet is just nonsense compared to my complex.”) . After making the purchase, the victim discovers that he has purchased a "dummy" or instructions on how to start a business selling "business packages". The purchased manual may say that this is only the first part of the manual and that the remaining parts must be purchased separately, usually at a higher price. Another option is the assertion that the acquisition of the next package will increase income by an order of magnitude. Discounts may be offered for the purchase of several packages at once, while creating the illusion that such a step is beneficial. In fact, from such manuals, the victim will not learn anything that could not be read on the Internet

One of the home-based business scams offers to grow strawberries (wild strawberries). The advertisement for this case claims that there is a method by which strawberries can be grown all year round at home, getting a large harvest that can be sold for a significant amount of money. By paying a certain amount for a video guide, the victim receives, at best, a collection of tips for growing strawberries in greenhouse conditions. In fact, strawberries are a fastidious plant, and it is impossible to get a commercial scale crop by growing it at home. The same applies to pineapples, orchids and many other plants.

Signs of deception

Fraudulent job offers are often accompanied by such illustrations.

There are several signs by which you can easily distinguish a fraudulent offer from a real one.

The main difference between fraudulent offers and real ones is that in fraudulent offers the employee is asked to pay the employer for something. Methods of extortion of money are very diverse, while the amounts of money required can be small. The announcement may say that the employer is allegedly losing money due to unscrupulous employees who do not fulfill their obligations, therefore, it is forced to take a “symbolic” advance payment as confirmation of the “seriousness of intentions” of the employee. It is reported that the deposit will be returned with the first salary/fee. If it is about manual work (sealing envelopes, sorting balloons, making candles, and so on), then the employee is charged for materials, while their price is inflated and no return conditions are specified. Fees may also apply for certificates, personal identification cards, lucrative offer notifications, instructions of any kind, manuals, video tutorials, testing, application forms, or employment assistance. Organizations that actually provide placement services only collect money after they find a job for a client, for example as part of the first salary. A scammer can swindle money repeatedly using different pretexts. A real employer will never demand money for the opportunity to start work.

The purpose of fraudulent offers is to attract as many potential victims as possible. In such ads there are no requirements for the age, experience, qualifications of the employee. The position is not indicated there, there is no information about the terms of reference, it is indicated only that the work is home-based. These ads first indicate the meaning of the work and the necessary requirements for the applicant, only then they say that the work can be performed remotely. Even just having the word "work from home" in an ad is a red flag, because it's not a job title. Fraudulent offers promise a potential victim a high income, in particular, they can be promises of a large salary. The volume of promises depends on the choice of the scammer and on the inhabitants of which country the advertisement is targeted at. The real employer will pay a salary appropriate to the qualifications and education of the employee, as well as the complexity of the work performed. He will not pay big money for such primitive work as cutting out labels or sealing envelopes. If the ad talks about some high-yielding business at home, then questions arise: “Why would someone want to share a valuable idea with potential competitors, instead of earning oneself and whether someone would pay big money for the product / service produced ? The job that scammers offer is often not very similar to the one for which someone is willing to pay money. For example, making by hand what is usually done by machine.

Scam ads are like advertisements. They can be emotional, they can have all-caps sentences and lots of exclamation marks. They can be overly wordy and contain many grammatical, spelling and stylistic errors, which is not typical for real ads. They are placed so that many people can see them, unlike the real ones, which are targeted only at those who have a certain qualification. A real employer does not need an unlimited number of employees, he needs an employee with certain skills for a certain position. Fraudulent offers are spread in ways that a respectable employer would not use. These are leaflets on fences, on poles, on the walls of houses, notes in newspapers for free ads, distribution of business cards on the streets. Most of these offers are distributed via the Internet. These are messages posted in large numbers on a wide variety of online forums. They are placed on specially created sites and come in the form of spam. Fraud sites often consist of only a few pages. 

There is an easy way to identify fraudulent ads - you need to type the name of the organization providing the vacancy in a search engine and check what they write about it on the Internet. There are resources supported by enthusiasts and deceived job seekers that collect information about fraudulent employers. Reaching out to them makes sense. However, this method of verification is also unreliable, laudatory reviews about the company can be left by the fraudster himself under different names or by his accomplices. Just like a bona fide company, its competitors can write negative reviews. Despite a certain unreliability, this method of verification, as a rule, is quite effective.

Most often, scammers prefer to receive money not in cash, but with the help of electronic payment systems. There are schemes that offer the victim to send an SMS to a paid (aka short) number. Such a request is an absolutely accurate sign of fraud.

A necessary but not sufficient sign of the absence of fraud is a properly executed labor or civil law contract, which specifies all the obligations of the employee and employer. It is assumed that this agreement will accurately indicate the name of the employer, the range of mutual obligations and liability for failure to fulfill obligations by the parties, the amount of remuneration and the conditions for its payment. Often, a scammer, in order to lull the vigilance of the victim, concludes an agreement, but not labor, but on the sale (if the employee is sold materials) or on training (if the employee is charged money for training). If the work involves manual labor, then the lack of a guarantee of the sale of finished products or the possibility of returning defective materials to the employer is a sign of fraud.

In general, an offer that is so good that it does not look like the truth is not real.

Declaration example

Work at home advertising this ad has several indications that it is a scam. It does not impose requirements on the qualifications of the employee, the age requirements are very mild. Of the contact details, only an email address located on a free Gmail domain. Directly in the title it is indicated that the work is home-based, but there is no specific data on the work itself. The address of the company's office is not indicated, only the city in which it is allegedly located is indicated. The declared salary in these regions at the time to which the announcement refers was quite high, especially for part-time work.

Methods to lull the vigilance of the victim

In order to convince a job seeker to voluntarily part with the money, scammers use manipulation techniques designed to reduce the victim's ability to think critically.

The most common technique is aimed at people who want to get rich quickly and easily. The victim is offered the opportunity to earn a lot of money, much more than what she is used to earning, without putting in much effort. Very often, such promises drastically reduce the victim's ability to soberly analyze the situation.

If possible, the scammer creates the illusion that he needs the worker urgently, that the victim has many competitors, or gives some other reason why he should act quickly. The victim is not given time to think (“Those who want too much, you may not have enough work.”) because an overthinking victim can recognize the deception. Methods of suggestion, suppression of critical thinking are used, an atmosphere is created that prevents a calm, unhurried consideration of the details of a job offer.

Along with the promises of getting rich soon, there are promises of what comes with it - a luxurious life, respect from others and financial independence. The ads link it all to a specific homework offer. Success stories are told of people who allegedly made a lot of money from this job, it is reported that the problems of the victim are in the past and that the life she deserves will begin, and so on. All these promises are accompanied by images of smiling and laughing people, expensive cars, mansions, money, gold and everything that is associated with happiness, wealth and prestige. The amount of promises is unlimited. It is emphasized that everything depends on how diligently the victim will perform this particular work. The scammer makes an effort to give the offer a solid and serious look. The victim is offered the history of the company's development, phone numbers of key employees, photographs of people, buildings and documents allegedly related to this organization, and the like [Note 2]. Everywhere possible, enthusiastic or simply favorable reviews are posted about a particular work at home with links to the site of a fraudulent employer or other contact details, allegedly written by people who have become rich in this work and want to share it with others. Often such reviews are posted on the site of the scammer. Next to fraudulent ads, there may be ads for the recruitment of storekeepers, movers and other personnel, placed in order to give the site a believable look. The ads may mention the names of well-known companies. This creates the illusion that the job offer has something to do with them.

The fraudster starts extortion with small amounts of money, hoping that the victim, once parting with the money, will continue to pay, in the hope of returning the lost. The fraudster also relies on the fact that, having realized the deception, the victim will not contact law enforcement agencies if the amount of money lost is small.

A fraudulent ad may explicitly state that it is not fraudulent (“All the proposed works are legally legal. We have nothing to do with the activities of organizations and individuals that abuse the trust of people for personal gain and for any fraudulent operations.”, “ Unlike most scammers, we work seriously."). To lull vigilance, scam sites or even scam ads themselves may contain calls to beware of deception.

Fraudulent offers may also appeal to the religious feelings of the victims. The ad might state that the job was offered by a "Christian company" (what this might mean is not explained), that it is a job for Christians, that it is blessed by God, and so on.

Anything can be written in fraudulent ads, because fraudsters obviously do not intend to fulfill their promises. The assumption that some moral standards will somehow prevent them from carrying out fraud is erroneous.

The victims are those people who are guided by the desire to get rich quickly and with minimal effort. In this desire, the victim and the fraudster are similar, only the fraudster manages to realize this desire, but the victim does not. Victims may have such qualities as suggestibility (compliance, pliability), ignorance in the area in which fraud is organized (including legal illiteracy), gullibility (without a tendency to critically analyze the situation), adventurism, infantilism (in the form of underdevelopment critical thinking), anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. Due to the difference in mentality, different fraud schemes have different effectiveness in different countries. In particular, among the inhabitants of the United States there are many who have the so-called "entrepreneurial streak." Such people do not want to work for others, so they are more likely to become victims of those scams that promise financial independence. In Russia, scams are more effective, where something is offered “for free”, that is, for free or at a reduced price.

Here is a list of typical victims of such schemes:

• Unemployed people suffering from burnout syndrome and seeking to find a job as soon as possible in order to improve their lives
• Unemployed looking for easy, high-paying jobs
• Unemployed who do not have sufficient skills to get a high-paying job
• Employees looking for additional income
• Elderly people, disabled people, parents with small children and other people who are not able to freely leave their homes
• Those who have a lot of free time and the desire to use it to earn money
• Those who have to travel long distances every day in order to get to work
• Those who do not have the time and/or desire to study the labor market
• Those who are uncomfortable with the normal working day
• Those who are unable to get a job due to lack of suitable vacancies
• Depressed people who want to make money by all means

Young people are more likely to be victims of fraudulent employers, as they have less life experience. During periods of economic instability, the number of applicants for home work increases.

Consequences

The consequences of such schemes are as follows:

• Loss of money: Entry usually requires a deposit, small or large. Some false employers run away immediately after receiving the money. Others demand higher fees, promising higher profits in the future. Sometimes wages are paid with false checks or manufactured products.
• Loss of real job: after leaving their real job in search of "easy" money, the victim often cannot return to it.
• Loss of good name: Selling a defective item can seriously damage the seller's reputation.
• Problems with the law: some victims are paid with counterfeit money. At the same time, they may inadvertently break the law while working under the direction of a criminal, with all responsibility falling on them. These violations can be both administrative and criminal. The situation may be that the victim will have to answer for the crimes of his employer.
• Lost Time: Victims often waste large amounts of time without getting paid a dime. This time they could spend on earning money at legitimate work.

• Identity theft: the purpose or one of the purposes of fraud may be to obtain personal data of the victim, which can be used for criminal purposes or sold to a third party who can use this data in various ways, in particular, to send promotional materials on behalf of the victim by mail .
• Loss of trust: Employers who offer legal home-based work face being perceived as fraudulent.

Fight against fraud

The prevalence of fraudulent schemes with home work is explained by the fact that in the vast majority of cases, the fraudster manages to evade responsibility. One of the reasons for this is the fact that in most cases the scammer operates through the Internet, where it is easy to remain anonymous by not providing their contact details or forging them. Even if the identity of the perpetrator is established, it will be quite difficult to collect evidence to bring him to justice. The fact that the victims of one fraudster, as a rule, do not know each other and cannot coordinate their actions also plays a role. Often the amount of money lost by the victim is small enough (100, 200 or 300 rubles) for the victim to start active actions to return it.

Responsibility for the implementation of various fraudulent schemes may or may not be provided for in the legislation. This is due to the fact that fraudsters are quite resourceful in inventing new schemes, and legislation is being improved relatively slowly. This allows some swindlers to go unpunished, even if their guilt, from a philistine point of view, is not in doubt