Working at home sounds very appealing.  No commute and you get to work in your pajamas.  What could be more convenient than that? Unfortunately, many work-at-home job proposals are nothing more than scams and, in the case of reshipping work-at-home jobs, you may even be an accessory to a crime when you are recruited to ship goods bought with stolen credit cards.
Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) obtained a temporary restraining order to shut down a deceptive work-at-home scheme the FTC alleges was being perpetrated under various names including Work At Home EDU, Work At Home Ecademy, Work At Home University, Work At Home Revenue and Work at Home Institute.  These companies promised their victims they could earn “hundreds of dollars per hour from home, without any special skills or experience.”  These  scams were advertised primarily through what is called “native advertising” which is paid advertising that appear to be legitimate news stories.  The advertising was placed in legitimate online websites including Forbes.com.
According to the FTC, the work-at-home jobs offered by these companies were just scams that violated federal law by failing to make required disclosures and provide evidence for their inflated earnings claims.
TIP
As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.  Check out work at home scams with the big three – your local attorney general, the Better Business Bureau and the FTC.  And as always, you can Google the name of the particular company offering you the work at home program with the word “scam” next to it and see what turns up.  As for reshipping scams, they are always a scam and you should steer clear of them.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish native advertising from legitimate news stories so you should always be skeptical when relying on information contained in news stories that require you to make a payment.  In addition, most legitimate websites do not investigate the advertising that they carry so you cannot rely on a trustworthy website to contain trustworthy advertising.  Remember my motto, “trust me, you can’t trust anyone.”