Saturday, April 21, 2007

Stuffing envelopes till you drop

One example of a work at home scam that you see ads for constantly on the Net is the stuffing envelopes scam. How anyone in their right mind can think they’ll get $5 or more for each envelope filled with advertising material is beyond me, but the scammers obviously think they’ll find enough people to do it because they keep advertising.
In a number of cases the scammers will ask you to pay a registration fee upfront. That’ll be the last you see of that money – or anything else. Others will get you to pay a fee and then tell you that the way to make the money is to advertise to others in the same way and get them to pay you. The old pyramid approach.
Think about it: Why would any company in these days of computer addressing and machine stuffing want to send envelopes, stamps, stuff to stuff the envelopes with etc to someone’s address when they could do it all themselves? In the past the shop I managed used to send its mail-out to a company that employed many people with disabilities. They would put the addresses on and stuff the envelopes – but there was no vast fee. In fact it cost us very little, comparatively, otherwise we would have continued to do it ourselves.
While I was looking up scams on the Net one site told me about a way to make money in a completely different and entirely legit way. The only problem is that there isn’t likely to be much work in this area. You can still apply in some parts of the States to be a member of Police Identity Parades. You register with the local station, and when they want to do an ID Parade, and when you fit the bill as someone similar in appearance to the alleged criminal, they’ll call on you. It doesn’t sound to me like a very lucrative job, however, nor one that you'd be called on to do very often!

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