Job scams come in various forms. Many are pure scams, designed to rip off job hunters with fantastic new products that only they, miraculously, have available to the lucky buyers. It is important to avoid these.

Online job scams

The usual story with the typical online job scam is:

• There's this wonderful thing you can buy.
• Someone living in a cave in Arizona loves it.
• There are thousands of words on the subject, and no actual information about what it is or what it does.
• There are repeated uses of credit card logos on the page, each offering a discount.
• Someone living in a tree in Manitoba loves it.
• Someone, somewhere, is making enormous, and strangely specific, amounts of money out of it.
• You still don't know what it is, but a guy living in a canoe loves it.

This is all standard spiel. Some of these things are actually written on templates, and they forget to change the script, so you can see the same stuff for several different, and equally worthless 'products.'

It doesn't matter if it's work at home, affiliate marketing, or actual sales. There is one simple evaluation for these things: they're all garbage. You'll achieve more in your job hunting by catching up on your sleep.

Other scams include:

• Unpaid work, which is passed off as being an 'internship,' which unless it's formally accredited, it isn't.
• Cut and paste jobs, the lowest of the low, paying less than peanuts, and antagonizing site administrators.
• Dating sites. Arguably the most ridiculous, brain dead of all job scams, this is pure trouble, liabilities galore, and you actually have to pay for it.
• Anything with ridiculous claims about profits. People are now trained to produce figures out of thin air with these ads. They make a few cents when you click on the ad, and you get a problem with a price tag.

Many are heavily camouflaged, like the notorious 'essay scam,' where people write essays for the sites' clients. They do the research, submit the essays, some of which are quite complex, and may or may not get paid. The essays are rewritten, scrambled, reassembled, and sold as new work, and the original author, again, simply doesn't get paid.

Job scams all have one thing in common. They don't stand up well to scrutiny. There's always missing information, and weird claims saying they're brand new, but have all these dedicated users giving testimonials, for example. If you search the name of the job ad, and just add 'scam,' you'll usually turn up something, unless the ad is so new nobody's had a chance to complain yet.

Always be suspicious

It takes about ten minutes to put together a job scam ad. Many are so similar that you can literally copy some of the text, search it, and find endless results for many scams that have just had the product name changed.