We'd all like to earn a living, or at least a little extra money, from the comfort and convenience of our own home. How do you recognize a real opportunity from a trap designed to steal your money?

There are definitely some good ways to earn money while working at home.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous people who choose to make money ripping the rest of us off, and preying on our desires to work from home.

If you're looking to evaluate an opportunity, keep these few tips in mind.

1. Beware of those who want money up front.
   It sounds legitimate to have to pay for information and materials to start a work-at-home opportunity, and in fact, many legitimate businesses do require some sort of startup fee.  The problem is that the scammers know this and use it to their advantage.  The trap can often be detected when you have to pay money up front before you're given enough information to know what you're getting yourself into.
2. Look out for the home assembly gig.
   You've seen the ads.  "Make $225 to $700 weekly assembling products from your home."  Scammers start with the premise that it sounds logical that businesses look to outsource the production of products to save money.  The fact is, however, that businesses have many more cost-effective ways to do this rather than taking on the overhead of managing a huge staff of independent home-workers.  This scam looks to get you to pay for a startup package that includes supplies and instructions for making some sort of product.  Their goal is to overwhelm you with something that is far too difficult to make, or where you have to invest a LOT of time to make any real money.  If they don't knock you out right from the beginning, they are often very hard to reach or they will tell you that your products are substandard and they won't pay for them.
3. Watch out for opportunities that sound too good.
   You've heard it before.  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  "Opportunities" to make money by performing a simple task are often not what they appear to be.  For example, the trap to the offer to make money stuffing envelopes is that they sell you articles on how to make money then tell you to stuff envelopes with copies of these articles and sell them to others.  Another example is that making money as a home typist generally means they want you to "type" ads online selling home typist opportunities to others.  Both of these start with the big red flag, "pay us first!"
4. Is their first point of business to convince you they're not a scam?
   This one is pretty simple.  If their first communication starts with, "this is not a scam!" then you can assume it is.  Legitimate businesses offering legitimate opportunities are going to focus on their opportunity and making sure you understand what it is.
5. Watch out for Pyramid Schemes!
   Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) is a very successful and legitimate way of doing business.  Once more, the scammers build on this to take advantage of you and steal your money.  The traps here can take a number of forms.  Legitimate MLM businesses seek sales of their products.  Scammers seek sales of their startup kits only.  Legitimate MLM businesses sell to the public.  Scammers sell to their marks, usually building on the legitimate-sounding premise that you need to have adequate stock on hand to handle the sales that will start rolling in.  Legitimate MLM businesses grow by selling AND recruiting.  Scammers are looking solely to recruiting.  The Direct Sales Association (DSA - www.dsa.org) and the Federal Trade Commissions (FTC - www.ftc.gov) are great resources in assisting to determine if an opportunity is a legitimate MLM, or just a scam.

If you want to make money working from home, do your homework.  Don't assume you're going to find a get-rich-quick opportunity, and research what you find to make sure it's not a trap to steal your money.  In addition to the FTC and DSA, look to the Better Business Bureau, the Direct Marketing Association, the National Consumer League's Fraud Center, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and of course, Google.

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The old WebChamber.com web site had a number of Member Committees that served as the basis for the new Public Forums.  There were a number of committees that have not (perhaps yet) been created on the WebChamber.com site.  So the question is, "Why did we create this forum?"

While the public view of WebChamber.com was inactive over the past couple of years, we had a continuous flow of questions about work-at-home opportunities.  Many of these inquiries were about members of WebChamber.com.  People wanted to know if their offers of work-at-home opportunities were legitimate, or if they were a waste of money - or worse yet, were they outright scams.

Frequently, after we answered the initial questions, we were then asked questions of advice.  How do you know if an offer is valid?  Do you know of any companies offering work-at-home opportunities?  How can I get started?

Clearly, there's a huge interest in opportunities to work from home, and we would really like to help everyone who wants to pursue these opportunities.

It became clear that there were different ways one could work from home.  The first, most obvious way was based on the requests we received.  Some companies offer opportunities for you to work from home performing various tasks that the company would like to outsource.  Frequently, they pay for services based on units.  Create so many "things" and get paid so much.  Research, type, surf, or perform some other task a certain number of times, and get paid a certain amount of money.  This type of opportunity is very attractive, especially for someone who wants to make some extra money on the side without the additional burden of a full or part-time job or trying to start your own business.  Unfortunately, this high level of desirability also attracts scam artists looking to take advantage of people and steal their money.

The second way to work from your home that we identified was to start your own business.  There are countless people all over the world who do this, and they're providing equally countless types of products and services.  Running your own business, however, has a much higher level of complexity.  There's accounting, marketing, sales, and all kinds of things in addition to the actual work you choose to do.

And finally, there is telecommuting.  This is where your employer offers the opportunity (sometimes grudgingly) to work either full or part-time from your home.  This is very popular among the employees, but for the most part, employers remain skeptical.  They have a certain comfort level when they can see you working at your desk.  Unfortunately, they lose that comfort level when you're working from home.  This is despite the apparent evidence that home-workers are more productive.  Who knows?  There may also be a certain level of jealousy.  Why would they want to let you work from home where they're having to drag themselves into the office every day?

We would like to address these types of work-at-home opportunities and the issues and challenges they face, and see if we can't help in making this dream a reality for those who wish to pursue it.

If you have some thoughts you would like to share on this topic, please visit the Discussion Boards in this forum and get started.