With the increasingly grim economic forecast and rising unemployment rates, the amount of work at home scams on the net is increasing. The most popular right now are the money mule schemes, which masquerade as job ads for at home "shipping clerks" or "payment processors". The ad offers an attractive weekly salary for accepting payments for an overseas company. You're asked to deposit the payments into your bank account, take your cut, and wire the rest to the company. A variation on this has packages rather than funds being sent to you. Either way it's not only a scam it's very illegal. In the case of payments, you're actually doing what's called money laundering, and it's a felony. The scammers are sending you funds obtained fraudulently, usually through phishing schemes or fake Ebay auctions. In the variation involving actual goods, most often they were bought using stolen credit cards or hacked Paypal accounts. If you get a job offer like this, delete it immediately.

Another form of work at home scam involves legit sounding ads placed on sites like Monster.com. The links in these ads lead to sites that steal your personal info. Beware of any job ad that promises large amounts of money for little work. The old rule still applies. If it sounds too good to be true, it is!