How to get justice for a work from home scam
Making big money working at home doing easy jobs such as stuffing envelopes, designing web sites, assembling crafts, is a dream for a lot of desperate women and men. Such offers and the way they are advertised (be your own boss, earn extra easy cash, supplement your income, make easy money, get rich in short period of time, etc.) are very appealing to them.
Unfortunately, lots of those people are victims to such offers and are unlikely to get back what they have invested into the business.
People need to be very skeptical when offered a "get rich quick" opportunity. If you are one of those people who receive a letter or an email promising you financial freedom, don't respond. By simply not responding to those offers, you are helping to decrease the amount of business for scammers.
Here are a few steps that you can follow to avoid being one of the scammers' victims.
1) Protect yourself against such schemes to avoid being one of their suckers:
|
|
- Never take obscure offers from strangers.
- Never give away your social security number.
- Never give away your bank account number.
- Never enter into an investment with a company that you don't know.
2) Look out for characteristics to identify a scam:
- It promises a quick and easy way to make money.
- It involves very little or no effort at all.
- It requires a start up fee or a small investment.
- It sounds too good to be true.
- It asks you to reveal personal information.
3) Check any suspicious business with:
- The Ministry of Consumer Affairs.
- The Federal Trade Commission.
- The attorney General's office in your state and your local Better Business Bureau.
Home-based business scams are crimes of deception and dishonesty playing on consumers' emotions, situations and ignorance. Potential victims are more likely those who use the internet, the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed and mothers with young children at home.
But let's say despite all the cautions and warnings, you happen to fall into a home-based scam, how do you get justice?
First of all, try to solve the problem yourself by calling the company if its phone number is listed. If it doesn't get resolved over the phone, follow up with a letter stating the matter with details and what you want done and send it to the mailing address. In a situation like this, always keep copies of relevant documents, receipts, canceled checks, contracts and promotional ads. After all your effort to solve the problem yourself with no results, hire a lawyer.
Second, you can submit your complaints about home-based business scams and scammers to your local Better Business Bureau. They now offer an online system that allows anyone to file complaints easily and quickly. The Better Business Bureau is a good source of information for consumers who want to know about a company's existence, its reputation and how well it's doing.
Third, find a company on line that offers a web site that allows you to write a report for free on companies and people who scammed you. This kind of company allows for others to view your comments and to add theirs as well regarding yours and their bad experiences with scammers and home-based business scams. This will also help the non-victims yet to take precautions before responding to such scams.
To summarize this, you can only do so much if you find yourself being scammed by an individual or by a company. Most of those scam businesses don't provide their name, address and phone number. Scammers are very clever and constantly come up with new ways to attract victims to fall for their schemes. The first and most important thing for you to do is to protect yourself from scam artists by being careful and smart. Do not share personal information and send any money to them. Do a thorough research on the business or on the individual scammer. You can help putting those home-based scams out of work by not responding to their ads, and more importantly by reporting them to agencies that care and want to protect the consumers.
