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Millions of us toil away at jobs we hate while dreaming of the day when we start a profitable work from home business.

More small business opportunities exist today than at any other point in recent memory. By the same token, there have never been more scams floating out there which makes it hard to find the legitimate opportunities. Although great opportunities do indeed exist, television and Internet ads would have us believe that just about any work from home business can turn into millions. In truth, only some will.

Most of these ads are promising the moon but the majority of them fail to deliver. Here are the top five scams being used by con artists and shady businesses in the work from home genre:

Crafts

Envelope Stuffing

Computer Scams

Medical Billing

Pyramid Schemes

Are you by any chance someone who likes working with their hands? Making products in your own home to sell to companies for profit is one of the most profitable and booming small businesses on the market today. Naturally the pitch will vary somewhat to make it sound more genuine, but this is pretty much the standard line used to promote the home assembly scam.

At the end of the day, this scam revolves around the investor purchasing expensive equipment and materials that the company insists are necessary to produce the goods. Anyone who actually buys the equipment and builds the products will find it all but impossible to sell them to the company. They wanted to sell you their overpriced equipment, not buy your over-priced products.

Have you heard about this envelope stuffing business where you can make serious money just sitting around on your couch all day? By the time most realize what has really happened, the simple yet devilish nature of this scam tends to catch most completely off guard. Investors place their own envelope stuffing ads in order to make their money back. It never had anything to do with envelope stuffing! This is basically the scam that just keeps on giving, because if you want your money back after investing in this gem, you need to spend more money on advertising to then con others out of their cash!

Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can truly start a legitimate and profitable work from home business-- a fact that many scam artists are trying to capitalize on. While there are literally thousands of various computer-related scams floating around out there, the most common are those promising you money with some sort of data entry or word processing work.

In order to learn how and where to actually make any money, the company will charge a small fee that you can supposedly recoup in just a few days. But the investor can never actually make any money with the information they receive because it is too vague, contains no actual job opportunities, and is ultimately a complete waste of money. This scam amounts to a lot of big promises but fails to deliver any concrete plan, job, or even a true plan to make any money.

The legitimate health care worker shortage is being exploited by con artists as they create fake business opportunities supposedly designed to fill this void and make big money for people like you. The medical billing profession is in true need of qualified professionals and currently outsourcing services to work from home professionals. Thus, it appears like a true opportunity to fill a need and make good money. Investors are often required to pay "franchisee" and other fees that can cost thousands for most programs.

The money would be well spent if the investor actually had a viable and profitable medical billing operation at the end of the program but this is very rarely the case. Attaining contracts with health care providers is so difficult that even the FTC has issued warnings to consumers about medical billing home based business programs. Rather than invest their money in a program with such a low probability of success, an investor would be better served waiting for a better opportunity.

The most common and alluring scams out there is the multi-level marketing scheme. These scams are easy to spot because they all involve you bringing in more people under you with the bait being that you earn money from anything they bring in plus whatever you earn.

At first glance, all of these scams look like a golden opportunity and appear perfectly legal. The simple truth is that those products only mask the true nature of the pyramid or MLM scheme to give it the illusion of legitimacy. The only people who ever make any money in these scams are those who created them leaving the average investor with little to nothing to show for their efforts.

The home based business scams listed above are some of the most popular on the market today. These scams come in hundreds of varieties with new ones being dreamed up every day. We have never actually seen more scams and more legitimate work from home opportunities at any point in modern history. Controlling your financial future may boil down to weeding through the scams and capitalizing on the real small business opportunities.