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This is the first in a series of posts I will be making about “Work at Home” job scams. My first topic is “online data entry jobs”. In this first post I’ll be discussing how the scam works and in my follow-up posts I’ll discuss how to recognize a scam when you see one. The third follow-up will be on real job opportunities — none of which cost job applicants money to apply for.

Online Data Entry Job Scams

You’ve seen the opportunities on Google and they used to be all over Craigslist until Craigslist started charging advertisers money to make job postings in their major markets. It goes something like this:

Make Money Working from Home
No Experience Necessary
Data Entry Jobs paying up to $500 a Day
Learn more now!

And then you go to the website and find out you need to pay anywhere from $17 to $97 to get more information about these jobs. Thus breaking rule no. 1: Never pay to work.

The fact that the “data entry at home” job opportunities have dried up on Craigslist as a result of them now charging for job postings is one of the first clues that those jobs were scams in the first place. Any real employer, even small ones, are willing to pay to post their jobs. Craigslist is much cheaper than advertising in most metro Sunday papers. They only charge $25 for a job posting in a major city like Boston. Real employers never require an application fee from job seekers.

How does the Data Entry Job Scam work?

There’s a couple of different possibilities for exactly how any particular job scam works, but the most common is a new spin on the “stuff envelopes at home” scam, specifically designed for the internet. Instead of being told to place the exact same classified ads in newspapers, selling the “stuff envelopes at home” opportunity, you are instead told to place ads online using pay-per-click services such as Google Adwords. What product will you advertise? Why the membership to the “Data Entry Jobs at Home” website, of course. Or the ebook! Whichever way they are packaging the scam, that’s what they want you to sell and if you do it, it puts even more money in their pockets — assuming, of course, you are successful and are actually able to sell the scam to other people over and over again.

Can you actually make money placing ads on Google Adwords? Yes, you sure can. It is a perfectly legitimate way of advertising things or information that is for sale, but it doesn’t resemble data entry in the slightest. This is how many affiliate marketers advertise their offers and many of those offers are not scams. You will have much more success at this kind of work however if you are not selling scammy products and you know how to write sales copy and how to market products. In essence, affiliate marketing using Google Adwords is a sales job. And sales jobs are nothing like data entry jobs, so right there, the data entry job offers are totally misleading.

If you are interested in affiliate marketing with Google Adwords, I would still stay away from the data entry sites. The information they give on Adwords is sketchy at best and you are more likely to wind up losing money on Adwords than making a profit. The first place you should start learning about Adwords is at Google itself.

And start reading.

Once you’ve read everything on the Adwords site, if you still need more guidance, there are dozens of Adwords books available. Two of my favorites are Beating Adwords and Adwords Miracle. Both sites offer a free e-course on Adwords, so sign up for both and use the e-course to see which one you like best before deciding to buy one. Actually, even the free information is pretty good.

Stay tuned for part 2 on How to Recognize a Data Entry Job Scam