Before you decide to open a home business, you should look at the more common type of home business scams so you can know what opportunities you should avoid. Here are some of the more popular home business scams that you need to watch out for.

Number one: Envelope stuffing
This scam is where you pay a start-up fee, which will allow you to purchase a starter kit. The starter kit is going to include letters, envelopes, and labels for you to use. Most people who begin this job are promised that they will earn $5,000 or more each week, just for stuffing envelopes. What happens is that you stuff the envelopes and buy postage to mail them off, but you are never paid the money that you are owed for doing the work.

Number two: Reshipping
How this scam works is that the people who are offering you this opportunity buy various goods with stolen credit cards. Once they have purchased the stolen items they have them shipped to reshippers, which would be you. What you are supposed to do is re-package the items and send them to a P.O. Box, which is usually in another state or country. However, once the police begin to investigate the stolen credit cards you get into trouble because you are the one that the goods were shipped too.

Number three: Money-mule
The money-mule scam is also another popular one; it is similar to the reshipping one. However, this scam does not require you to repackage and reship stolen goods. How this scam works is that the scammers get U.S. citizens that want to work from home or run a home business to cash counterfeit checks or to deposit stolen funds into their bank accounts. Once you have cashed the check or deposited the funds you are asked to wire the money abroad, most often you are wiring it to the scammers themselves. Once the bank realizes that the checks are no good, which is usually two to five days later, the money is already gone and you're left owing that money to your bank.

Number four: Data entry
This one is probably the most popular home business scam that is out there. You are simply asked to send in a membership fee of $47 to $129 to join a member's only website, where you are guaranteed that you can find some kind of work doing data entry. You are lured into this home business with the promise of a weekly income of $300 to $1,000 a day for perhaps 30 minutes of work. Once you have paid the upfront fee to join the website you never get a chance to do any typing, mostly because the work opportunities do not exist. In some cases, the opportunities existed, but rather than being paid in cash, you were entered into a sweepstake or even received free merchandise.

The one thing that you want to keep in mind with home business scams is that they most likely prey on senior citizens, stay-at-home moms, and people who are considered low income.