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Want to make $10,000 a week working part time? Forget it!

A job scam is a job that is too good to be true. Most job scams aimed at young people work like this: You see an ad that says, “Work from home! Set your own hours! Make $10,000 per month working PART TIME! Call 1-888-YOU-LOSE for more information.”

Sounds perfect, right? So you call the toll-free number and get a recording telling you all about your great new career in international marketing, sales, medical billing, restaurant testing or whatever the latest gimmick is. Then it tells you that all you have to do to start your great new job is send $15 to a certain address, and they’ll send you everything you need to get started.

So you send the $15, and you wait. And wait.

Sometimes, you won’t ever get anything in exchange for your money.

Other times, you’ll get a packet of information about your new “job,” plus a list of people to contact for work. For example, you might get directions on how to do insurance coding (or some other job that’s equally impossible to learn from the brief information you’re given) plus a listing of all the doctor’s offices in your area who use insurance coders.

What the packet doesn’t tell you is that most of those offices have full-time employees whose job description includes insurance coding. It also doesn’t tell you that you could’ve gotten the same contact information from the Yellow Pages for free.

If 50,000 other people around the country were taken in by the same ad, the people who ran it made $750,000, minus their copying expenses and the fees for buying lists of names of doctors’ offices around the country. Not a bad money-maker for them, but a terrible one for you.

If a job sounds too good to be true, it is. If it promises a lot of money with minimal training, plus the option of working from home or setting your own hours (and the ads don’t usually say exactly what you’ll be doing), it’s likely a scam. Lots of ads even say “Tired of gimmicks and scams?”

It should never cost you money to apply for a job. If you come across job “opportunities” that make big promises while offering little information, run the other way.

Laura Purdie Salas is a writer living in Minnesota. She moved out of her parents’ house at the age of 16 and worked plenty of embarrassing jobs to work her way through college. Good advice kept her from falling for job scams, though! Check out her book, Taking the Plunge: A Teen’s Guide to Independence.

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