Problems in online jobs, work at home scams

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I have been glued to Internet for 5 years now. And I have learnt a lot in this time interval, all thanks to the fact that I had to learn everything from the scratch-right from exactly what is a "website" to how to open multiple pages at the same time and "browse" through them!

Thus, there have been many revelations and discoveries on the way.
The biggest and most shocking revelation has been that of the sheer number of scammers and spammers inhabiting this web world.

Millions of new Internet users are getting glued to worldwide web everyday. India, especially, is a developing world where many unsuspecting citizens are exploring Internet everyday. Teenagers, youngsters, Senior Citizens-all age groups are logging on the net for various purposes

And most of these naïve Internet users are totally unaware of thousands of scammers out there. No wonder then that the scammers keep laughing all the way to bank. I have personally encountered so many scams that now I can identify a scam from a genuine opportunity at a glance. I have been fortunate enough to learn from some of my friends' experience also.
Before I got my current Data Entry Job (without paying a single paisa) I was searching for a part time job everywhere - online as well as offline.

While there were a lot of call center jobs, none of them provided me with the flexibility of working schedule, which I needed badly. There were some event promotion and marketing jobs too, which I did temporarily.

However, I searched every nook and corner on the online world to land my perfect part-time job. And encountered many shameless frauds, all in past 1 year.

First, in June 2005, I landed up on the shore of "Paid-to-Read Email Jobs". It sounded simple enough-there would be a fixed amount of emails sent to my inbox everyday, I would need to just read them (or just keep the window open) for say 45 or 60 seconds and my account would be credited with a fixed amount of rupees.

I signed up with 200dollarsmails, Silvanamails, 200Euromails, Inbox Dollars and Giga-Cash- all promising to pay in Dollars on reaching the minimum payout, the minimum payout ranged from 10,000 dollars to 3,00,000 dollars. All I had to do was read 5-10 emails everyday and each email credited my account with minimum 200-300 dollars!

Well, this sounded too good to be true, so I sent mails to all the webmasters to ask them about the truth-truly, they could not pay thousands of dollars, and I got reply from each one of them saying that they convert those account dollars into real dollars, the rate being something like "10,000 account dollars=35 real dollars". This seemed pretty reasonable. So I started work and within a month, reached minimum payout on all sites. But then, I got no response from any Webmaster. And just when the alarm bells of "scam" started ringing in my mind, they all banned me from their sites!

Then I came across Polar PTR, the Webmaster seemed very nice-his name is Eric (that's what he told me). I came across his site in google research and this time, without taking any chances, I asked him fully about the entire process. He duly explained that his site does not claim to pay thousands of dollars. They send 3-4 emails everyday and each email credits 20-50 cents for a 60 second duration. He even offered to let me talk to some of advertisers there.

He even referred some "Paid-to-Surf" programs like Surf junky, and affiliate programs like "Resource-a-Day net ".
I again started working. However, this time it took me 2 months to reach minimum payout of 1 dollar and just on the day I reached it, my account was "Suspended" for some reason on all 3 programs.

This was the last straw. It proves beyond doubt how all these "Paid–to-read" or "Paid-to-Surf" programs are nothing else but a façade for getting cheap publicity and free workers. They make a naïve person sign up, by giving all sorts of "honest" credentials and then that person works like a dog, reading emails, surfing the net, going through endless advertisements of many such other junk internet jobs and even imploring all his friends to sign up and make money and after a month or so, his account is suspended without any warning or reason! This conclusion of mine has been reached from my personal experience and also by careful analysis of several other users who have been duped in similar manner.

These are some International online jobs one should beware of.
However, coming to Indian online job schemes too, there is not much to rejoice. We also have a very bad record of just about 1 in 50 internet jobs being honest and paying.

Some Popular Scammers in India who have no shame in endorsing and popularizing scams are as follows.
"Consumersindia.com", "dhandhaulat.com" are some sites guarantying thousands of rupees for a few surveys everyday, however, when you sign up there, all you get are some emails crediting your account with 1 or 2 rupees for a 60 second advertisement!

Then there are sites like-"Imperial Biz", "Ebiz", "iREDindian" which guarantee a "part time job where you can work for 2-3 hours everyday and earn 15-20,000 per month sitting at home". But when you sign up here, all you have to do is promote the same slogan of empty promises on a thousand classifieds and pray to God that someone is foolish enough to respond to your ad! The worst part is that you are supposed to actually pay some thousand of rupees to become a member of these sites (and they guarantee that you will get it back in first month itself with your work-a guarantee with no backing)

Moreover, there are many scammers out there promoting sites like-"Typeinternational.com " and "dataentrypro.com" which are certified International scam sites. Still, they blatantly go on promoting "Get 1 dollar for every referral you make" and other such lies.

The toughest thing to do is to bring such culprits to book. In India, we do not have strict cyber laws unlike in Western Countries and also such scammers keep changing their names and addresses while keeping the modus operandi same.

Thus there is a need for constant vigilance. That is how I have decided on the basic rule of Never Paying Anything To Get a Job and also the job should have a clear-cut description, not vague or very easy or very complicated. Let us give these scammers a tough fight.

Contributed by Loveleen, Mumbai