My mom called me up last night and asked me if I could call a phone number for her to see if it was a legitimate home business opportunity. She knows that I work at home and that I have had months where I made more in one month than she made all year at her hotel job.So I wrote the phone number down and told her I would call it. I asked her what she knew about the business, and what she knew was amazingly little. She didn’t even know the name of the product or what exactly she would be doing. She said the infomercial did say that you could start with no money down.

I was fairly certain it was a scam, since any real home business is going to tell you what you are doing up front and they certainly don’t hide the company name from the public. For example, I work for myself, but I was trained in part by the materials inside Your Wealth Course .  Any legitimate business will want their name mentioned as many times as possible and the same thing goes with their product.  Right there, on the first page it explains what it is that you will learn to do to make money online.

If the ad doesn’t tell you the name of the company, the product or service, and it doesn’t explain what you will be doing, you can be fairly certain it is a scam of some kind. While you certainly wouldn’t expect a small magazine ad to have the space to go into detail of the inner workings of the business, you should certainly have an idea of what the business does and what the name of the company is. Can you imagine someone handing you a business card without a company name on it?

Let’s face it, there is is probably is no bigger group of scams online than those offering a “Home Based Business” opportunity. You find these ads all over the internet, on television and inside magazines. They are usually glossy full color ads promising instant riches and tons of free time with very little work.

The biggest red flag indictating that it is a scam is lack of clarity. It should be very clear to you what is being sold or what you will be doing if you become part of the opportunity. Often, elaborate marketing text and graphics hide the fact that clarity is missing.

In the case of my moms so-called home business opportunity, it was the fast talking Don Lapre. As soon as I called the number I was assaulted by Don Lapre assuring me I was about to become rich. I recognized his voice from his past scams and am well familiar with his personal history, including how he recently filed for his second bankruptcy, all the while pretending to teach people how to be rich like him.

I had to listen for 15 minutes before he finally mentioned once, just once, the product name. The Greatest Vitamin in the world. Ripoff report has 61 open cases filed If you type in “Don Lapre” you find 119 cases filed. I am not a fan of the Quackwatch site, because the site is very pro pharmaceutical and against anything natural, but they have some interesting information on Don Lapre.

Luckily, my mom has me to look out for her, but millions of people fall prey to these kind of scams every year. In this case, no money needed turns out to be $35 and then they upsell you into all sorts of stuff and many people end up thousands of dollars into it. Let’s not forget the value of your time. Even if you did only put $35 in, how much is 2 months of promoting a product to not get paid a penny worth to you? Your time is worth a lot more than the lure of a cheap entry fee of $35.

Any real home business is going to have a significant start up cost. You can’t honestly expect to make $100,000 a year or more with a $35 business. If that were true everyone would be doing it. Expect to spend between $1,000 – $10,000 to get started in most legitimate home based businesses.

Research any company offering you a work at home business. Ask for references of other people who are working the business. Find out exactly what you would have to do in order to work this business from your home and make sure you are capable of doing it. Also important is to make sure that you will have all the training that you need, .

If you want to learn how to earn money from home while working for YOURSELF, and you want total freedom to work in any field you desire, I really reccomend you check out www.YourWealthCourse.com   There is no greater reward than to spend your life doing what makes you happy.

Good luck to all of you in your journey to work from home.