1. A very common home business scam these days targets people such as housewives or stay-at-home moms. This scam is known as the "Product Assembly" scam. What happens here is there will be an agency claiming to send you materials to build a product (for example, a bead necklace), and you will have to pay for those materials. Once you have received the materials, they promise you a fair payment of money for the finished, built product. This all seems fair, right? You will simply put in the labour of building the necklace, and receive money in return. However, they will send you shoddy, low quality materials that break easily, and when you have built the necklace they will simply tell you that it is not up to standard and reject your necklace, refusing to pay. Watch out for this nasty scam.
2. Another scam would be people asking for you to invest thousands of dollars into a payphone, promising it to be in a profitable place such as a busy mall. However, they either take your money and run, or they will install the payphone at a ridiculous and secluded place, giving you next-to-nothing profits.
3. A similar scam involves investing in internet kiosks, where people will ask for your investment in an internet kiosk (a place where people can use the internet, for a fee). They will take your money and flee, never hearing from them again.
4. A classic home business scam that dates back to 1920's is the classic "envelope-stuffing" scam. There are many variations to this scam, but the main idea is that there will be an advertisement or letter sent to you claiming that "Uncle Larry" earns $2,000 a week from stuffing ads/flyers in pre-addressed envelopes, earning $2 for each envelope he stuffs. All it takes is $39.99 to sign up for the envelope stuffing program. After you send your money away, you will receive a package back from them (if you're lucky) containing your envelopes and flyers. It sounds too good to be true, right? That's because it is. You find that before you can start making money, you have to spread the news about the "wonders" of envelope-stuffing. You might have thought that all the flyers you were stuffing into envelopes were for proper businesses... no. All the ads and flyers advertise what you just signed up for - envelope stuffing. They tell you that you must get another 1,000 people to sign up for envelope stuffing before you get paid. That way you can invest even more of your money into advertising in newspapers, adverts, etc. This is a tricky scam that is best avoided.
5. Lastly, there is the scam of "Re-shipping". This involves people contacting you, asking to join their reshipping program, where they ship goods to you, for you to reship them off to an address or P.O. Box in your country. The catch here is that those goods were bought through stolen credit cards or such, and so when they ship it to you to reship it to another address, the goods are traced on you and you do the time in jail. It is a sneaky scam that must be avoided.
