Finding a legitimate home based business that will allow you to work the hours you want and pay a decent wage is a goal a lot of people have. Unfortunately, the scammers know this too so they are going to do everything they can to take your money. Don’t get me wrong there are companies that provide legitimate work for home but there are many that don’t. You first step when researching a job offer should be to check out the Better Business Bureau and see if the company is listed there. If not I would stay away and keep looking. Below are some common scams that are pulled.

No legitimate home based business opportunity is going to come in an email message that you haven’t requested. If you get an email telling you about some fantastic opportunity then send it on to the scam center. These are often times based on the Nigerian scam. Some one will send a message saying you can get several millions dollars just by giving them your bank account number. Once you provide the number they clean out our account and are gone. Do not respond to any unsolicited messages about making money.

There are some assembly work jobs that are legit but a lot of them are not. What they do is charge you a fee up front for the material to make the item. You then spend your time creating the crafts or whatever and then when you send them back to the company for payment they deny them saying they aren’t of quality. You are out the money for the materials and the time you wasted on the project and they are off to scam the next victim. For a real work at home job you shouldn’t have to pay up front in order to do the work.

Another scam is based on high tech so it seems more like it is based in legitimated home based business opportunities. This one involves recovery shipping charges from UPS and Federal Express. The add says you can make boat loads of money by tracking packages for companies and then recovery shipping charges if they are late. Not only is no business interested in this but it is against the shipping agreement of UPS. You spend hundreds of dollars up front for the software and then have no where to use it.

Envelope stuffing and data entry are two more classic work at home scams that have been updated for the new century. With envelope stuffing the ad says you can make hundreds stuffing envelopes. You buy the information booklet and find that you are supposed to place ads for envelope stuffers and collect the money when they buy the booklet you just bought. There really are not envelope stuffing opportunities any more because of automation. With data entry you often times are forced to buy a training package and then once you have completed the training they tell you to go out and find some people to transcribe for like doctors and lawyers. What? They don’t really have any jobs they just make money by selling the training to unsuspecting people.

Medical transcription goes along with data entry above. This is a great skill to have if you know someone to work for but there are a lot of scams out there that sell you training and software that supposedly is going to help you get a job. Once you have spent all that money they tell you to call doctor’s offices and see if they need transcription done. The vast majority won’t even talk to you.

It is very hard to find a Legitimate Home Business that involves working at jobs that don’t require business skills. If you are looking for a way to make extra money then you would be better off trying to find something in your community like child care, making craft items to sell locally, or putting together gift baskets to sell locally or by specification. If you want to start a business online then that is a different matter that takes a different skill set than just sitting in your bathrobe drinking coffee and waiting for the money to arrive.

What I want to talk about today is a disconnect that is happening when a lot of these high dollar programs are hawked to people trying to start an online business. Here is how the process is sold.

• Buy my expensive program.  It is filled with all kinds of stuff
• Build a web site
• Offer the stuff I tell you to sell
• People come and buy it
• You get rich

The problem with this plan is a big assumption is made that an unwary internet marketer usually doesn’t pick up on. They think, great, I pay $995 or $1995 and I get rich that seems like a reasonable deal. So they spend the money and set up the web site, which costs even more money, and then they wait to get rich. The problem is they wait forever because there is one aspect of a successful internet marketing program that is missing from the above plan. It is the ingredient that is absolutely vital to every business endeavor under the sun. It has been called the lifeblood of any successful enterprise whether it is on the internet or a corner grocery store.

You gotta have customers. If you don’t have customers you will not make any money online or offline. Period.

The problem with the majority of these high ticket get rich quick schemes is they don’t talk at all about how to get customers. They lead you to believe that all you need to do is “build a site and they will come.” There is nothing further from the truth. You have to learn how to give people a reason to visit your site before they will come and you can have a hope of selling them anything.

I almost bought this program about two years ago but then I happened onto a group of guys who really understand how the internet can work to help everyone, not just themselves. They don’t rip off people who are looking to start a business. Instead they will show you how you can build successful money generating websites in which everyone wins. This is the key to a successful online business .

If you are looking for an online business idea then do a search in Google for the term Make Money Online. The top spot is held by one of these guys. He goes by the name Grizzly but he is really just a big teddy bear. Read every thing he says and you will understand a lot more about being successful in a win/win way than all these so called Guru’s who just want to take your money and run.

The second guy is a fellow named Vic at Blogger Unleashed. Vic is a great guy with a whole lot of information but he has a tendency to talk like a sailor so if your ears are tender be aware.

The third person is Court Tuttle. He is now offering a course on internet marketing that will take you step by step through the process of how to make money with an online business. The great thing is the course doesn’t cost $1995 or $995 or even $195. You can join for one dollar and try his method for a month. If you don’t like it you are out a buck is all. But I am sure you will like it and you will find his teaching methods are easy to follow.

Any time you are looking at a course on Internet Marketing or starting an internet business online you have to be sure it doesn’t gloss over the missing ingredient. It must have a component that speaks to the question of how to get customers to your site. If you don’t learn that you will never make any money in this business and you will certainly not get rich with an online business opportunity.

Today I was reading Courtney Tuttle over at his Keyword Academy blog. This site is packed full of great internet marketing information you can use to make your Christian home business a success. Look in his archives and you will find over two years of posts chocked full of tips and tricks.

The post today is titled I Bet The FTC Smokes The ‘Posting Links On Google’ Facebookers. Have you seen the ads recently that say you can make thousands of dollars a day by posting links on Google? Well, Court was talking about the Landing Page that is used when you click on one of those ads. On the page there is a picture of a guy named Paul Steinbach who just happens to be from Provo Utah where Court lives. Kind of strange but not unreasonable right. Well a few days after clicking on the ad Court was in Arizona and clicked on the ad again. This time the landing page said Paul Steinbach was from Phoenix, Arizona. So Court writes a post about the program and how they are marketing it and lists a link to the landing page.

In the comment section of Court’s blog people starting leaving notes about seeing the ad in their area and each time the ad says Paul is from the town where the people lived. One said he lived in Arkansas, one said he lived in New Jersey, one said he lived in Perth Australia and there was even one from Malaysia.

So how can he be from all these places? It is really quite simple. When someone clicks on the ad he has a program that checks to see where the person doing the clicking lives. The program then inserts that location in the landing page sales copy. It’s a trick that is used to try to build rapport with the customer. You are more likely to have an affinity for the guy if you think he is a neighbor.

Come to find out the program is nothing special. People make money every day from posting links to Google. All you do is get a webpage and place Google Adsense on it. Those are the little Google ads you see on blogs including this one. In the near future we will be doing some posts on how to utilize Adsense for you to make money with your Christian home based business opportunity.

There are a lot of people on the web selling programs that really don’t have any more information than you can find for free if you look around. Before you spend money on a $300 program see what you can find in the blogs on my blog roll. You can be successful with your Christian business without spending an arm and a leg.

I bought into a program that said I would make a fortune on line if I only followed their advise. When my $197 program arrived I read it and studied it but I didn’t make any money. Why? Because it really didn’t tell me what I needed to know to actual generate any income. They basically said, “put up a website and people will come and they will buy stuff from you and make you rich.” I guess it was my fault because it sounded too good to be true and, as usual, it was.

I have learned you can make money with an online business but it takes a lot of work. I read something very telling in a blog the other day. “Making money online is easy but most people are not willing to do the work required to be successful.” Like all good things an online business requires work. You first have to find out what people are looking for. You do this with market research tools. Next, you find out how to fill their need whether it is a product, service, or information. Finally, you use the search engines to drive traffic to your site by getting keyword anchored backlinks. That is basically all there is to it. It’s simple but it takes work finding the market, finding out what the market wants to buy and building the back links to get the search traffic. These are all things we have talked about and I will continue to explore because although it is simple there is a lot to know. If you find a program that offers you success with no work run away because it is probably a scam.

I have really noticed lately that there are more and more people who are shedding the light on scams. The Passive Income Online blog has had several posts about programs that claim more than they deliver. The post Get Paid To Blog: Is It A Scam talks about Today.com blogs and their claim that you can make money by blogging on their site. Go check her blog out after you get done reading this.

Lately, the big scam I have seen directed at people who want to start a Christian home based business is cash gifting. This is a despicable ponzi scheme that I have posted about before at Fight Christian Opportunites Online Scam. The scam goes like this: you join the program and then pay a gift to the people above you in the pyramid. The more you gift the more you supposedly get back later. Thus people give as much as possible because they are told 10 times more will come back. Then you get other people to join and they give cash gifts to you and the people above you. This is a classic pyramid scheme because eventually there are no new suckers to bring into the “business” and the whole thing collapses. The only ones who make out are the ones on top who set the whole scam up. Please don’t get sucked into a scheme like this because you are just throwing your money away.

If you truly want to start a Christian online business then continue to visit here and check out Grizz’s site. You have to offer people something they want and you have to get them to your website. That is all there is to it. You can be successful with a Christian home based business without spending a fortune on less than worthwhile programs and schemes.

There seems to be an increase in the number of people who are trying to scam Christians with so called opportunities online. I wrote several posts about this including Christian business scam. In these times of economic turmoil and upheaval everyone is trying to make a little extra money to make ends meet. Some people reading this blog have lost their job and were at the end of their rope when a scammer came along and took what little they had left.

Several people have visited this blog wondering about a site called Christian opportunities online and whether or not it was a scam. I visited the site and reported back to my readers what I found. You can read that post at Christian opportunities online scam. As part of my investigation I had to input an email address in order to view the program. I have not heard anything back until today.

Christian Business Scam

When I checked my email there was a message from ChristianBusinessNewsletter with the subject line, “Your financial future is in your hands and God’s guidance.” I had never heard of the Christian Business Newsletter before so I decided to open it. They had my name and email address so I figured I must have been in contact with them before.

When I clicked on the message it opened to a landing page with Christian Home Based Business as the title. The subtitle was the same as the subject line of the email. Then there was a three sentence paragraph telling me their opportunity was unique because it valued integrity and honesty. It then talked about my destiny again and finally told me how God had blessed me with this opportunity. The email was signed by Maggy L. (I wouldn’t want to give my full name either if I was trying to take advantage of people). It then had a Start Today button to click. I clicked it and was taken back to the site I have explored before in the posts I mentioned above.

They have made some changes including a button to click entitles “Beware of At Home Jobs”. I found this interesting considering what they advertised before turned out to be a Cash Gifting Ponzi Scam type of program. I clicked the button and found that it took me to another site talking about how everything but their programs are scams. Apparently they don’t know who is advertising their programs or maybe they are really the same people.

Anyway I wanted to alert you if you get an email from Christian Business Newsletter this is what is contained in side so you don’t have to open it. I will continue to report on any Christian Business Scams I find while providing you with free home based business and Christian online business ideas. Starting and running an online Christian business opportunity can be lucrative but you have to watch out for scammers because the internet seems to draw them like flies.

A few days ago I wrote a post explaining how I would try to find out more information about Christian Opportunities Online and determine whether or not it is a scam site. Since then I have visited the site and entered my name, email, and phone number. As I said before, the web page has no information regarding what the actual opportunity is. This is always a red flag for me. If a website wants your email address and especially your phone number without informing you as to why, you can usually be assured you will be getting a lot of unsolicited emails and phone calls trying to sell you some big money making scheme.

Christian Opportunities Online Website

The main page on the website Christian Opportunities Online says you can “earn money helping others,” “Join the thousands of home entrepreneurs who…embrace traditional values like honesty, integrity, work ethic, and family relationships,” and “Use your God-given talents and experience to do something unbelievable for yourself, your family and your financial future.” It sounds nice doesn’t it? It sounds like the perfect Christian business opportunity. You get to make money while helping others and your own family. These are hot buttons most people have and a good copywriter can push them at will. Who ever wrote the copy on this page knew how to push buttons.

I found something interesting once I entered my information and clicked the “Click Here” button. I was immediately taken to a completely different web site called Abundant Living System. This is another very pretty site. There is a picture of a fancy car and $20 bills flying around in the air. The headline reads, “The Original Creators Of The Abundant Pay if Forward (PiF) Gift Program). They then go on to talk about how their members are receiving $20 – $2000 daily with zero effort.

Note: If someone trys to sell you a system that allows you to make money with no effort you need to instantly turn around and run, not walk, away. Every scam known to man uses the idea of Money For Nothing as a center piece. It plays on our greed and gullibility. Usually this type of offer is focused on the least fortunate of us all, someone who has lost their job or have massive bills that need to be paid. When we are drowning financially it is easy to grasp at any type of potential help available.

Back on the Abundant Living System page there is another “I Want To Learn More” box for you to input your information into again. In the subtitle of this box, we finally find out what the offer is all about. This is a Cash Gifting program. If you are not familiar with Cash Gifting it works like this:

You join the program by giving a “gift” to the people who brought you into the system. In this case the minimum gift is $75 with a $50 administration fee. You then sign up other people who give you gifts of money. The people who you bring in then add more people who pay not only your first level of members but also you. This is a classic operation that is based on continually getting more people to join. Wikipedia has a great article on Cash Gifting. In this system, you have the option of giving an original gift from $75 to $12,000. The kicker is if you give a small amount, like $75, then whenever anyone below you enters the system and gives more than your original amount you do not receive any part of that gift because you did not trust enough at the beginning. Does this sound like a way to get people to give as much as they possibly can for a future big payout?

Christian Opportunities Online Cash Gifting Scheme

According to Wikipedia, Cash Gifting is a Ponzi Scheme which is illegal. The Abundant Life System people claim that it is not illegal because all the money changing hands is in the forms of gifts. Apparently, the United States IRS does not agree. There is a great article on the Abundant Life System at Cash Gifting Watchdog. They lay out exactly what the Abundant Life System says about the legality of the site. Then, point by point, the Watchdog disputes these claims. Regardless of how the government feels about cash gifting (it is illegal) I think it is morally reprehensible. It is nothing more than a scheme to get money from honest, hard working people and put it into the pockets of the few people who start the scheme. Whenever you here about cash gifting as a legitimate business model you can be assured that someone hopes you haven’t read any articles like this one.

There are a multitude of legitimate Christian Business ideas that can be implemented on the internet. I am dedicated to finding the Christian Business opportunities you can implement to make a profit on line. One thing I will never do is promote a program or system I have not used or investigated myself. I hope this clears up the question of Christian Opportunities Online scam or not. Continue to visit this Online Christian Business Opportunity blog to find out legitimate ways for Christians to make money.

I visited the site today in order to find out what they are offering. They have some very nice graphics and there is a lot of copy about how you can love life again and how you can make money working from home. Interestingly, they don’t say you can make money they say, “would you like to earn *1000’s working from home?”

A skeptic might ask 1000’s of what because they have replaced the $ (dollar sign) with an * (asterisk). It would make one wonder what they really mean.

No where on the site does it say what the business opportunity is. To me, this is always a red flag. If they won’t tell you anything about the business it makes a person wonder what they are trying to hide. There is also a disclaimer that this is a home-based business opportunity and not a job. Maybe they have promised something before and didn’t deliver, I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there are not legitimate Christian online businesses offered online. And this may be one of them. I am just reporting what I see on the website. I try to steer clear of people who have the next greatest make money scheme but they can’t tell me what it is unless I sign up or give them my email.

This site not only wants your email address (which they will use to send you information) they also want your phone number. I don’t know about you but I have had a lot of scams, Christian or not, who have called me trying to sell me the moon. Generally, when you give out your phone number you are asking for a lot of high pressure sales calls coming from boiler rooms. I don’t know that this will happen if you give your phone number here but I wonder.

I think the best thing to do would be to give them my information and see what I can find out about their Christian Opportunity Online. I hope it is a legitimate business that can offer Christians a way to make money online with a legitimate Christian business. I will report back in a future post what I find out. In the mean time I don’t know if Christian Opportunity Online is a scam or not.

I have had several people visit the blog about a Christian Opportunity Online Scam. The most often asked question is how do you tell if it is a scam or it is legitimate? This is one of the reasons I started this Christian online business blog. There are a few things I have found that help spot scams and I want to pass them on.

If the website is offering something that seems too good to be true then it may be a scam. If the site offers all the secrets to an online fortune working only 1 hour a week (or some other ridiculous thing) it is probably a scam. There are fortunes to be made on online but it takes work.

I have been on line for quite a while and I can tell you that the guys making the fortunes are not working only one hour a week. They are business men and women and are working more than the average person. The reason these people are so successful is they work hard and they work smart. They know what actions on the web bring the biggest rewards.

Above I said if something seems too good to be true it may be a scam. This is not always true but it is something you should be aware of.

Currently on the web many of the major players are giving away a lot of good information for free in order to get you on their email lists. Most of this information is first rate and I have received some real gems this way. The key to making this work for you is to realize that the emails you receive will be sales offers. You do not have to buy what they are offering.

When you get an email from one of these so called gurus try to learn from their marketing techniques. Most of the big Internet Marketers are great copywriters or hire great copywriters. They can use words to persuade people to want to buy what they have for sale.

This doesn’t mean what they have for sale isn’t good it just means be aware that it is a sales offer. What I do if I get an email offer that I am interested in is wait before I buy. If I am still interested the next day then I do more research to find out what others have to say about the product. This is one of the great aspects of the web. It allows you to find out what a lot of other people are saying about a topic.

If you would like another take on this topic check out my post about online Christian business opportunity scams from a few days ago.

Until next time, our prayers are with you.

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I use this blog to pass that information on to other Christians trying to make sense of this exploding technology. There is a lot to learn and it is changing daily but I know you can be successful if you put in the work.

I have received several questions about Christian Opportunities Online Scams recently. Like any business, just because someone says they are a Christian does not make it so. We will be known by our works. All through time we Christians have been taken advantage of by others claiming a fellowship with us.

Today is no different. I hate to say it but there are scam artists at work on the web just like everywhere. That is something to always be aware of. You must look into any offer and decide if it makes sense for you regardless of whether or not it is called a “Christian Opportunity.”

One of my goals with this is blog is to develop a community of like minded people who can come together to really be successful online without losing sight of our true beliefs. We are put here for a reason and it is not to take advantage of others. We are charged to glorify God and spread The Word. We can do this while running a business on line and making money to support our family’s physical needs.

I read a quote a long time ago and have used it as one of my guiding lights. “My vocation is the business I am in or the job I hold, my Avocation is my relationship with our Savior Jesus Christ.” And the avocation always is more important than the vocation.

So the question is “How do I spot a Christian Opportunity Online Scam?” Like all scams the key to making it work is to get the mark (that’s you) to believe they are getting something for nothing. Scam artists always say the only real tool they have is to ply to the greed factor. If the crook can tap into the mark’s greed desire he can make the scam work.

Let me state this again. “There is no free lunch.” If you think they are giving out free lunches on the internet you are a prime target for scammers. Like everything in life if you want value you have to work for it. No one is going to sell you a website for $500 or $1000 or $2000 that is going to make you rich without any effort on your part.

In our current economic climate people need help. Good people are losing their jobs, their homes, and their retirements. Scam artists know this and are playing on the fears and desperations of us all to target the greed factor.

Think about it. You are losing your home and can’t afford to buy enough food for your dinner. You are scared to death. Wouldn’t an opportunity to make an unlimited income sound like something you would grasp like a drowning man grasping for straws? Especially if the sales pitch was that you could just sit back and watch the money roll in? I think anyone might.

So what do I want you to know?

I want you to know that there are a lot of people making money online with legitimate businesses. I want you to know that they are working to make those businesses successful. I want to you know that you can make money on line. I want you to know you will have to do some work to grow a successful business.

Over the next months I will continue to give you tools for your success and you will have to use the tools.

Our prayers are with you.

If you have been scammed on the internet don’t beat yourself up too bad. The fact is, thousands of people have lost money to unscrupulous “businesses”. It is not the customer’s fault. These online predators are extremely good at sweet talking people into dumping their hard earned cash down a black hole.

Our Online Christian Business Opportunity blog is for Christians and run by Christians. Everything we do here is based on the teachings of Jesus and is Biblically based. Our mission is to help you make money on-line in a legitimate business and to hold on to the money your already have. If you want a light in the darkness of the internet this is the place to visit. We pledge to help you be successful any way we can.

Today a new scam is being targeted at Christians. Actually it is a new twist on an old scam. Here is how it works. This scam is based on the Mystery Shopper idea.

A mystery shopper is someone who is hired by a business to shop at their store. The idea is the shopper will take note of the shopping experience and then report back to the managers of the store on several aspects of the purchase. Was the store clean, were the clerks friendly and helpful, was it easy to find and buy the item? There are many legitimate opportunities like this for a part time business, but some of them are anything but legitimate. The following news report is an example.

Recently a woman in Oregon answered an opportunity for a Mystery Shopper program on the internet. A few days later she received a letter saying she was chosen for the program and in the envelope was a check for $3600.00. She was instructed to deposit the check in her account and then go to Walmart and use their money wire service to send $3200.00 back to the Mystery Shopper office. The letter made her believe she was testing the customer service of the Walmart employees. The remaining $400.00 was hers to keep as her fee.

A few days later she received a notice from her bank that the original check from the Mystery Shopper service was no good. Since she wrote a check on her account for the money transfer, she was now liable for the $3200.00. This woman does not have $3200.00. In fact, she no longer has money to pay her mortgage and may lose her house. The Mystery Shopper business is located in Canada and thus can’t be brought to justice.

This is a variation on the scam of sending people a check and then having those people send part of that money to someone else. A friend of mine was scammed like this a few years ago. He advertised a trailer for sale on ebay. Two days later a message arrived from a buyer saying he would pay full price for the trailer and would send a check immediately. When the check arrived it was written for $2600.00 more than the cost of the trailer. A note instructed my friend to deposit the check and then send the $2600.00 to a transfer company that would haul the trailer to the buyer.

My buddy sent a $2600.00 check to the hauler and then a few days later found out the original check was no good. By that time his $2600.00 check had been cashed and he was out the money.

Please, never send money to anyone unless you are absolutely sure you know who they are. A big red flag should go up in your mind whenever someone sends you money and then asks you to send part of that money to someone else. This is not how real businesses work. I hope this Scam Alert will help keep you from being taken advantage of.

Our pledge to you at the Online Christian Business Opportunity blog is we will not promote any business that we have not checked out to be legitimate. Visit us often for more tips on making money in a successful online business and on how to keep the money you already have.

Our prayers are with you.