The Work at Home Scam for the Ambitious: The Career Scam

Almost everyone will, at some point in their life, yearn for a chance to change career. Don’t fall for the career scam. Maybe you’ve hit a glass ceiling and feel like you can’t continue to progress.  Maybe you’re sick of the daily grind and wish you could work from home.  Or, maybe you feel like after 20 years in the office it’s time to pursue your real dream of becoming an author or an inventor.  It is possible to change career partway through your working life, but responding to a classified ad promising you the training you need to start that new career isn’t the best way to do it.

How Does The Career Scam Work?

The career opportunity scam comes in a few different flavors.  One common type of scam offers you the chance to buy into a franchise, or to have the chance to work as a company representative with exclusive control of your immediate territory.

The Career Scam

Another popular scam is to offer you, for a fee, the training and contacts you need in order to succeed as an author, inventor, proofreader, or video game tester.  When you pay the cash, you get a “kit”, an instruction manual, or some perfunctory training materials, and then you’re left on your own.  In the case of the first scam, you could end up paying a lot of money for some basic products that you have no chance of selling.  In the second scam, the training materials you receive are usually no better than stuff you could find on the Internet for free.

So How Can You Really Find a Work From Home Career?

If you are determined to work from home, you’ll do far better if you do your own research and look for legitimate work with established companies.  Today, lots of companies are willing to allow senior employees to work from home, using the power of fixed mobile convergence and remote collaboration tools.

You can do a lot of jobs, such as accounting, customer service, sales, and proofreading, from home.  Unified communications tools make it easy to collaborate with office based employees without you having to be physically present.

If you want to start your own business, or try your hand at freelance work, then you will need to be realistic about your chances of success.  Don’t fall for the advertisements that promise you huge earnings for part time work, and don’t ever hand over money for the chance at a job.  Real employers will not ask you for money up-front.

If you do fall for a scam, there’s a good chance that your money is gone for good, however it’s still worth trying to get your funds back, and to see if you can stop the scammer from tricking anyone else.  Be sure to report the scam to the Office of Fair Trading, the police, and Consumer Direct.  In far too many cases, the trial won’t go anywhere, but it’s worth trying in the hopes of saving someone else from losing time and money.

This is a post by guest author James Harper on behalf of Maintel, experts in fixed mobile convergence and other unified communications tools. Find out more by clicking here or visiting maintel.co.uk/solutions/unified-communications.

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