“Work from home! Part-time! Make $9,000 a month!

I put my resume on Careerbuilder.com 3 days ago, and it’s a good thing I did. To my surprise it appears my “no experience necessary” at-home keyboard poking skills are worth a whopping $365,000 to a whole lot of people. Wow! Why did I even go to school? Why do engineers even go to school?

After weeding through piles of job scams on the Website (and now, delightfully, in my inbox), I’d like to bring your attention to some dead giveaways that an ideal job opportunity may be no more than a dirty trick.

What have you got to lose?

Some folks have lost thousands of dollars after taking the bait offered by shady companies promising big, easy bucks. Others have unwittingly involved themselves illegal transactions! To cut your losses, look out for these tricks:

• “Get exclusive access to more legitimate, high paying job listings for only $29.95” Nope. Real offers won’t make you pay to see them. Also, I’ve learned to ignore any posting that pairs a big salary with the word “legitimate!”

• “There is a nominal fee for application processing and additional information about the position.” S-C-A-M! Real life jobs will not require you to pay for information. If they want to hire someone, they will provide details and be interested in your resume/CV

• “Data entry is easy and profitable. The only purchase you have to make is our easy to use data entry software.” Many of these too-good-to-be-true pitches leave you with useless software, no data entry jobs and a little less money

• “All that is required is a small start-up investment.” This “investment” may never be responded to, or as in the case of envelope-stuffing scams, the person responding to the ad will send in the money only to get instructions to repost the ad to get more “investments” for the phony company, and a check for you—directly from the person you just scammed

On ripoffreport.com I looked up one of the many, many hokey insurance companies who contacted me; and sure enough there were reports of the company “paying” salesmen only to treat the payment like a debt to be paid back when clients didn’t come through with signing up for their absurd insurance policies.

Signs of a real job:

• The employer mentions something specific in your resume, or at least asks for it
• Any e-mail sent to you appears to have been written to you—not a thousand anonymous people (your name with appropriate capitalization is a start)
• Specific requirements (like a certain degree) and expectations of experience
• If pay is mentioned at all, it should seem reasonable for the position
• On websites like Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com, job postings that are localized to the region you’re searching are more reliable than nationwide postings

Signs of a swindle:

• “Work at home.” Don’t fall for the stay-in-your-pajamas appeal. If it’s part of the advertisement, be wary. In the words of staffcentrix, “work from home is not a job title.”
• No request for a resume, no job description, no experience necessary = no legit job
• “Please send us your contact info. The employment service only showed your e-mail address.” Yeah. That’s because they didn’t care to open your resume!
• Astronomical salary/commission claims, for “part-time” or “at least 3 hours a day?” Come on. It may be slightly tempting when you see it posted, but remember what it looks like here: ridiculous
• If a potential employer’s message goes straight to your SPAM box, delete without opening it. They may be trying to see if your account is active.

Bogus Better Business Bureau blurb

If an advertisement or company Website seems fishy, but has a BBB logo, go ahead and check the BBB Website. There has been misuse of the logo; and even if a company bears it legitimately, they may have a bad grade with the Bureau.

Other helpful sites:
Scam Busters
WebAssured.com
Scam.com