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FTC Busts Work-at-Home Web Sites

The Federal Trade Commission dismantled a work-at-home scam last week that defrauded unsuspecting consumers out of millions of dollars. Two brothers, Eric G. Louie and Calvin G. Louie, misled consumers with false earnings claims for work-at-home schemes involving free government grants, mystery shopping, online surveys, and data entry.

According to an FTC press release, the Louie brothers charged consumers from $47 to $129 to access their “members only” Web sites with their “money-making secrets.” Not surprisingly, these programs either failed to exist or deliver easy money. Almost all the sites these scam artists ran are now disabled, including: Fastcashathome.com, Fastcashathome.homestead.com, Moneymakingsecret.homestead.com, Realcashprograms.com and Dataentrypro.com. One of them, Hometypers.com is still up and running, although the domain name is for sale.

The only people who earned easy money from these sites were, of course, the Louie brothers. The L.A. Times reports Eric Louie owned a $160,000 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo. Brother Calvin had slightly more expensive taste, using his ill-gotten earnings to spring for a 2005 Ferrari F430, which boasts an MSRP of $171,000.

Unfortunately for the two Louies, unless they want to cough up a $4.9 million fine, they’re going to have to surrender their sports cars, some frozen assets and any tax refunds for 2005 and 2006. If you want to prevent other scammers like these two from using your money to buy themselves six-figure Italian sports cars, exercise extreme caution before you even consider doing business with any work-at-home sites.

First off, read our tips for avoiding work-at-home scams, and our recent posts about Online Data Entry Jobs and Consumer Rated Home Based Businesses. Both the FTC and BBB also offer helpful fact sheets on avoiding these increasingly popular scams.

Posted by Jorgen Wouters on August 25, 2008 11:55 AM |

Comments

As someone that does grant research for a living it is always a sad thing to read about those who are misleading people about grants and grant programs in general - especially when there really are legitimate grant programs that are out there.

Posted by: Rose | September 17, 2008 07:52 PM

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