Business opportunity/"Work-at-Home" schemes

Fraudulent schemes often use the Internet to advertise purported business opportunities that will allow individuals to earn thousands of dollars a month in "work-at-home" ventures. These schemes typically require the individuals to pay anywhere from $35 to several hundred dollars or more, but fail to deliver the materials or information that would be needed to make the work-at-home opportunity a potentially viable business.
Often, after paying a registration fee, the applicant will be sent advice on how to place ads similar to the one that recruited him in order to recruit others, which is effectively a pyramid scheme.
Other types of work at home scams include home assembly kits. The applicant pays a fee for the kit, but after assembling and returning the item, it’s rejected as substandard, meaning the applicant is out of pocket for the materials. Similar scams include home-working directories, medical billing, data entry (data entry scam) at home or reading books for money.
The latest work at home scam is very elaborate, which includes an entire website dedicated to feigning the existence of a fake organization. Example: Timothy Scott (not his real name) emails to offer a job with the so-called Henry Gilbert Foundation. To lure gullible participants, they offer unrealistically generous salaries for part-time unskilled labor. (If they were real opportunities then naturally such positions would fill quickly without the need to email the offer to thousands of strangers.) The main responsibility of this well paying job is to be a middleman for "donations" which are intended for victims of natural disaster. In this capacity, it gives the scammer an excuse to ask for bank account numbers (allegedly to deposit "donations" into the victim's account for redistribution) as well as the victim's SSN and DOB (allegedly to fulfill the typical paperwork obligations of a new employer). Once these vital numbers have been disclosed, the criminal uses that information to monitor account balances. On the day that a larger than normal amount appears in the bank account, such as a weekly paycheck for example, then the account is drained. Generally the scammer will feign to be located in a country other than where he is located. Example: Travis Gilbert Foundation's website lists an address in The Netherlands, but the registration of the domain name is in Beijing. In addition, victims in Western countries are targeted by using a nonthreatening pseudonym like Timothy Scott, which doesn't sound so foreign, while the domain name tgilberthome.org is actually registered to Li Xiang.