When you take work from home scams down to their lowest common denominator, they’re effective because they lean heavily on psychology, emotion, and your life’s circumstances to convince you to hand over your money.
For example, according to Scambusters. work at home fraud targets four main groups of people:
- Disabled, elderly, and chronically ill individuals Stay at home moms Families with very little or no source of income Individuals without higher education
What do all these groups have in common? Based on their circumstances, it may be the case that they’re having difficulty making ends meet and need another source of income.
They may have a lot of weight on their shoulders, and without this additional income, there could be some dire implications. Enter work at home “opportunities.”
The underlying theme behind nearly all popular work from home scams is that they promise to help you make much more money than you already do while performing menial tasks.
Or, as this article puts it, “very often doing some simple task in a minimal amount of time with a large amount of income that far exceeds the market rate for the type of work.”
However they frame the “opportunity,” though, these scams will make it seem like you can legitimately make millions—or at least become very wealthy—very fast.
As soon as someone who’s in a dire situation or who has experienced negative life events reads these outlandish claims, they are prone to become highly impulsive as a result, and to willingly hand over their hard-earned money for something they know, deep down, is too good to be true.
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