If you've been using the Internet for any length of time,
there's a pretty good chance that one or two or 20 e-mail
messages bearing one of these teasers has landed in your in-box.
The senders of these messages promise "financial freedom"
or "independence from paychecks" with homebased business
opportunities ranging from envelope stuffing to designing Web
sites. And all that stands between you and freedom from your dull
office job and mean-spirited boss is one small payment . . .
Financial freedom sounds great. But are these so-called business
opportunities too good to be true?
At first, Lesley Fountain didn't think so. After running a
successful medical transcription service out of her Oceanside,
California, home for 20 years, Fountain went looking for a
homebased business opportunity that would allow her to spend more
time with her young daughter. One day, she received an unsolicited
e-mail message (a.k.a. spam) offering a seminar that would train
her to build lucrative e-commerce Web sites. Fountain spent nearly
$3,000 to register for the seminar, only to find that the five days
of training left her ill-equipped to write the complex computer
code required to build a working site.
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The company was more than happy to give her the extra training
she needed-for an additional $2,000 paid upfront. Refused a refund,
Fountain turned to the Web, where she found a number of newsgroups
and message boards filled with outraged comments about business
opportunity scams, some of which sounded very similar to the
seminar she had attended. It was then that she realized she
wasn't the first (or the last) person to be taken by
unscrupulous Internet scammers. "After I got on the Net and
saw some of the complaints, I realized I wasn't as stupid as I
thought and that other people had suffered the same fate,"
says Fountain, who has since started her own anti-scam information
site (http://www.scams101.com).
So why would otherwise intelligent people give thousands of
dollars to unseen strangers promising wealth without work? Fountain
attributes it to naiveté. "Everyone can use more money,
and these scams are sold as being foolproof. Many people believe if
you have a good product and do what you're supposed to do, you
can't fail, and that's why they get taken in."
From comments logged on her Web site, Fountain learned that
victims often lose far more than money. They also lose hope.
"When people who are looking for a genuine homebased
business get scammed, they sometimes decide it's just not
realistic to think they can do it-then they just give up on the
whole dream," says Fountain. "A lot of people just roll
over and die. I know people who went bankrupt or got divorced . . .
people actually told me they didn't see any other option than
suicide. It's an even bigger crime than stealing the
money."
To add insult to injury, scam victims get little sympathy from
family, friends or authorities. "A popular
misconception," says Fountain, "is that people who get
scammed don't want to work-that they just want to lay out and
have money dropped on them and therefore deserve whatever they
get."
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