Are you sick of ‘job opportunities’ that turn out to be ways of making money out of you? Have you become convinced there are no real ways of working from home? Think again, because I’ve found some genuine online jobs that you can do from home.

1: Data entry work – earn good money inputting information into spreadsheets or addresses into databases, and in some cases filling out forms online. Companies outsource such work in order to save money, thus giving us an opportunity to make money!

2: Forum entries – many online sites use forums as a method of marketing by way of placing comments in chat rooms that others pick up on. They will pay you to do this on a daily basis as it is a cheap and efficient marketing method.

3: Online surveys – the modern version of the market researcher is the online survey, sent to you by email and completed online. You can register for these at many different places and complete as many as you want. Pay for each one is not great, but a number can result in some great rewards.

4: Writing work – if you can put together written work with good sentence construction and grammar you can earn money by writing. Website content, blog entries and more are required by millions of people and companies worldwide, and the opportunity is yours for the taking.

5: Set up a blog – really, you should! Write about something that others will be interested in, and sign up to some affiliate programs. These pay you each time someone clicks from your site to theirs. It’s easy money, and potentially very lucrative indeed!

The Internet is a great place for information and opportunity, unfortunately though it is very easy to get scammed when you are looking for opportunity, so lets go over some of the more common scams used in working from home.

First of all there is the opportunity to be a payment collector. This is where you get an email saying the company will have its customers send you the money, and all you have to do is take a percentage, then send it to the employer by check or money order and you get to keep a percent. Here is what really happens.

The employer pretends they cant use paypal so they need you to collect funds. You collect the funds usually by check or e-check on paypal from the customers. You subtract the amount you are promised usually 10% then you buy a money order and ship it to the employer. In the mean time the check you have accepted as payment bounces and you now owe your bank or paypal the amount of the check, not to mention you are out the 90% of the funds you sent as a money order.

Another common scams is the promise of millions of dollars because of some long lost relative who died and there is no place for the money to go. You provide them your banking information to get the money deposited and they wipe your bank account clean.

Next up is the very common data entry position. You are offered a position where you will do data entry but here is what happens. You pay the enlistment fee of $10 and you get a packet of information that teaches you about your new “job” The packet is really only a few copies of the same ad you saw when you signed up and then a list of different places to place the ad. When a new person finds the ad and signs up you get the $10.

Another huge scam on the Internet is the Ebay and Paypal scams where you get an email from Ebay or Paypal saying something is wrong with your account, immediately frazzled you click through to go to their website, you login and it says something is wrong, etc. The reality is you click and login to a site where they are collecting your information and using it for no good. What you need to do when you get an email like this is to delete it, then go to the website, by typing the name in the search box and then logging in. Only then can you tell if your account is having some kind of trouble.