Numerous offers to let you work from home are merely attempts to take your money. There are a few honest ways of working from home; Jet Blue Airways, for instance, hires reservation agents that work at home. True opportunities to work from home are somewhat rare. There are always people who try to make use of any situation, and work at home scams are quite popular.

One popular work from home scheme is a variation on a check overpayment crime that has been in use for a while. In that scam, someone who is marketing something, perhaps on a Website, receives an offer to purchase. The purchaser then mails a cashier's check for payment, but the check is for more than the amount of the item. The customer asks the seller to deposit the check and to send the difference back to them, along with the merchandise. The seller does so, only to learn later that the check was a forgery. She is forced to pay back the total amount to the bank and they have also lost their merchandise.

One would-be victim received an e-mail offer from someone in Europe offering a job. The salary was good; the e-mailer was claiming to pay a few thousand dollars every week as a "distributor" of his company's merchandise. As a show of good faith, the company sent the recipient several money orders, drawn from a well known bank or credit union and totaling several thousand dollars. The would-be victim was asked to deposit those money orders, and after keeping 10% as a fee, to wire the rest of the money back to the sender. The problem is that the money orders are fakes. Federal banking statutes require that these kinds of money orders and checks be applied to the bank account of the individual making the deposit within ten days. Sometimes, though, it takes significantly longer than ten days for the forgeries to be noticed. If the would be victim has transferred the cash elsewhere in the meantime, he will be accountable for paying the bank back for the lost funds. Sellers who receive such an offer should ask themselves, "Why would someone send me a cashier's check to cash when they might just deposit it themselves?"

The typical admonishments apply here; if it seems too good to be real, it almost certainly is. Remember, real job opportunities don't require the employee to mail cash to the employer. Anyone who is interested in acquiring honest work from home opportunities ought to do detailed investigation before seeking employment with a company. As long as Americans are eager for cash, work from home crimes will flourish. Work from home schemes are popping up more and more often as people who cannot resist the thought of getting a lot of money for little or no work find participation in these schemes hard to refuse.