Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes include:

Common types of work found in work-at-home schemes include:

• Stuffing envelopes.^[2] The victim sees a flyer advertising a job stuffing envelopes, with "up to 1,000 envelopes a week that you can stuff... with postage and address already affixed!", offering a payment of $1–2 per envelope. To apply for the job, the victim is required to send a self-addressed stamped envelope for information and a small processing fee. In return, the victim is sent a template for the flyer they had originally seen; the envelopes they stuff are from other people who answer the flyer, and the payment is the processing fee.^[2]
• Assembly of items of some type, such as crafts, jewellery or medical equipment. The worker is required to pay upfront for materials and construction kits, and when they attempt to sell the finished products back to the scheme's organizer they are told that the products "don't meet our specifications", leaving the worker with assembled products and no buyer.^[2]
• Processing medical claims. The worker pays several hundred dollars for medical billing software, but will later discover that most medical clinics process their own bills, outsource their billing to established firms rather than individuals, or have stricter requirements than the purchased software can provide.^[2]
• Forum spamming. Usually advertised as some variant of "email processing", the worker is simply given instructions on spamming online forums and told they can make money by selling these same instructions online.^[2]
• Money mule, where the victim is required to receive and cash the fraudulent check and send back part of the proceeds and keep the other part. This is money laundering and will get the victim in trouble with the bank as well as with the law, as the check bounces (where the victim is liable for the bounced check) and can and often does lead to prosecution.^[4]
• Re-shipping, where the victim is required to receive the merchandise (often high-priced merchandise such as iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, or Pixel smartphones) purchased with stolen credit cards (or picked up at carrier service centers or retail stores such as Best Buy), then ship them eventually overseas, usually to Eastern Europe. The package may be re-shipped to multiple U.S. addresses before leaving for the scammers. The victim is usually in it for about a month, after which their communications with the scammers cease. The victims are usually never paid and lose money, often as a result of paying for shipping supplies, and usually further victimized with identity theft but are generally not prosecuted unless a warning from law enforcement is ignored. This type of scam usually occurs during the winter holiday season.^[5]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, work-at-home schemes, as well as victims affected by such schemes, were extremely common.^[6]

Some advertisements offer legitimate forms of work that really do exist, but exaggerate the salary and understate the effort that will have to be put into the job, or exaggerate the amount of work that will be available. Many such ads do not even specify the type of work that will be performed. Some similar schemes do not advertise work that would be performed at home, but may instead offer occasional, sporadic work away from home for large payments, paired with a lot of free time. Some common offers fitting this description are acting as extras,mystery shopping (which in reality requires hard work, is paid close to minimum wage, and most importantly, does not require an up-front fee to join) and working as a nanny.^[7][8][9]

Consequences

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