Let’s face it, working is rubbish. Unless your job happens to involve doing whatever you enjoy best for tons of money whenever you want there will always be a part of you that thinks ‘I wish I was somewhere else doing something else.’

For many people, the natural dream is to work from home because unlike, say, wanting to be a Belgian chocolate taster on a six-figure salary, it seems vaguely realistic.

Scammers know this – because, lets face it, they’d also prefer to be lying on a beach drinking one Mai Tai after the other rather than coaxing money out of gullible people. Sadly, unlike the rest of us, scammers are the kinds of people who are only too happy to use our perfectly understandable human weaknesses against us (see for example, our desire for cheap flats, white teeth, slim waistlines and absurd muscles.)

According to the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) there are up to 300 such scams at any one time, though I personally think you could add another zero to that number quite easily.

The way a typical work at home scam operates is thus:

1. You visit a fancy (or not so fancy) site that promises you working from home opportunities. You get excited. You start dreaming of lazy days getting up at 9 o’clock, delicately getting out of bed and switching your computer on for a leisurely day’s work.

2. It just so happens that whatever this company says you’ll be doing requires you to pay up-front. This could be for ‘materials’ or ‘training’, it doesn’t really matter. The point is they get their grubby hands on your money.

3. And then..? Well they might actually send you something, but you either won’t be able to make any money at all or at the very least you will make so little money that you won’t be able to afford those little extras like, say, keeping up with the mortgage payments or eating.

So how do you spot a work from home scam? It’s very simple:

1. They will ask you for money up-front. You’ve got to spend money to make money, right? Wrong. In a normal job, people pay you to do things. I’ve never paid money for a job yet and I don’t intend to.

Even if this was an investment, don’t you want to know more than just a basic sales patter? When you invest money in real life you want to know your investment is likely to make money. You wouldn’t just hand your cash over to some guy on the street because he told you he would give you something to let you work from home, would you? By the same logic you shouldn’t hand your money over to anyone on the internet without a good reason.

2. Most of their websites look awful. Surprisingly, for people that make money from selling other people an image most of the work-at-home sites I’ve seen are awful. Scammers seem to be deeply in love with the aesthetic of websites circa 1997. I don’t know whether this is because they get taken down frequently or what but it should be a massive warning sign.

3. They promise you ridiculous amounts of money. The only way you can make silly amounts of cash from typing stuff into your computer is if you are incredibly talented or a scammer. Making money from websites or writing online, for example, takes a lot of time and effort (ask any hubber!).

4. They don’t promise you ridiculous amounts of money. Some scammers try and play the ‘honesty’ card. Typically, the amounts they talk about are still well over average salaries so they get pretty much the same effect while appearing more sincere. It’s the same rubbish and you should ignore it.

5. They play on personal experiences. Scammers want you to imagine yourself working from home so that you’ll be more tempted to give them their money. To do this a lot of the time they will use (invented) personal stories. You might have a single mother who manages to make a lot of money and still get plenty of time with the kids. More recently the stories have become about people being laid off due to the global recession. The point is that they want you to identify with them, it makes you more likely to cough up the cash.

We’d all love to have financial independence and more time doing the things we want, but sadly that means working harder and smarter, not falling for scams that promise an easy buck.

I’m told that there are internet jobs out there and while I suppose this is true my guess is that they are far more prosaic and less well remunerated than the over-inflated fantasies touted by the work from home scammers. The most important thing is to really do your research. Most of these scams become known fairly quickly so you can google the name of the ‘opportunity’ plus the word ‘scam’ to find out whether its legit in less than a second.

Lastly, it goes without saying that you should never give these guys any money (at least I hope it does!) but equally you should never give these guys your details. This makes you easy prey for email spam and even identity theft.