Crooks these days. They’re nothing if not adaptable.

Have you seen the number of work-at-home “jobs” being offered on the Internet these days? They know what’s up. A lot of people are losing their jobs and are looking for something new. And it’s a great American tradition—recession (or depression) takes your job, start your own business!

However, the fact is that most people don’t have the right kind of entrepreneurial “spark” needed to start a successful business venture. It takes a certain kind of grit, a deep belief in yourself and your “product,” the ability to hold your head high when faced with failure (and to learn from that failure and move on, instead of taking it personally and wallowing in it), and the kind of positive attitude that, frankly, tends to get obliterated when you’re worrying about how you’re going to pay the mortgage next week.

Let’s face it: starting your own business is way, way tougher than working for someone else. How many times have you seen someone start their own little store because they were “tired of working 40 hours a week,” and you check out their new digs and they’ve got no clear vision for their business, they’re trying to be everything to everyone, and they’re only open five or six hours per day because they’re trying to make owning a business easier than working for someone else? How long did they last?

And I think most of us, deep down, know that. “I’d love to work for myself, but yeesh! 18 hour days, seven days a week?” It’s okay to admit that you’re not a natural born entrepreneur (can you become one? Of course. You can become anything you intend). But most of us know—it is a path of great resistance.

Send in the Work-at-Home-Scam Clowns.

They sound great, don’t they? Stay at home, do some menial task that takes ten minutes, and let “the power of the Internet” (or something) do the rest. You’ll have so many Porsches by this time next year, you won’t know what to do with them all!

Of course I’m going to tell you they’re all completely full of baloney. Nobody is going to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for nothing.

“Oh, but they’re not paying you,” you’ll say. “You’re starting your own business!”

Well, at best you’re going to pay them a large amount of money for a “startup kit,” fees, or other such bull. You’re not going to assemble kits at home, you’re not going to enter any data, and you’re not going to get paid to stuff envelopes. You’re going to get ripped off.

Fraud.org (run by the National Consumers League) has a great article called “Tips for Avoiding Work-at-Home Scams.” I would recommend you take a few minutes to read the entire article, but the following is a summary of their tips:

• Know who you’re dealing with
• Don’t believe that you can make big profits easily
• Be cautious about emails offering work-at-home opportunities (real companies do not recruit in this way. Ever)
• Get all the details before you pay
• Find out if there is really a market for your work
• Get references for other people who are doing the work
• Be aware of legal requirements (medical billing requires a license, for example)
• Know the refund policy
• Be wary of offers to send you an “advance” on your “pay”
• Do your own research about work-at-home opportunities

I would amend that fourth tip slightly: just don’t ever pay someone else to work for them.

About.com also has a nice article on this topic: “Work at Home Scams.” I’d suggest you read this as well.

Finally, never, ever trust the phrase, “Other work at home sites are scams, but I found one that isn’t!” There are tons of fake blogs out there. I even found one by searching for “work at home scams.” It had a whole article, possibly culled from a trusted news source, about avoiding these traps. It claimed to be an article from a newspaper in Cleveland. As you read, you suddenly find you’ve been eased into a sales pitch about how “this one isn’t a scam!”

Do they need to make it any more obvious?