Fox Carolina has run a story about a Mystery Shopper offer that allows people to work from home. Needless to say, this one is another scam and gets a lot of complaints against it in the States.

In my view if you really want to work at home, you either already have an employer who will allow you to do this, or you make your own employment - setting up a home business of your own. What I would never do is buy into a ready-made money making system that requires you to spend money up front before you get all the details. To me, work from home schemes like this raise a red flag immediately, but there are many people for whom they do not, and unfortunately most of those people are now worse off for it.

I think it does take a mindset shift to be able to start working from home, especially if you are going to run your own business. Buying into one of these schemes is an attempt to take a shortcut, and anyone who already has a successful home business knows that there are no shortcuts, just hard work and preseverence. The successful home business owner would be loathe to hand over any money up front for a ready made scheme - they tend to prefer to hold all the reigns themselves. How else do they have any control over their business.

So, beware anything that requires an upfront membership fee to join. Better still, never join a ready made scheme and instead start your home business from scratch. In the end when you have a successful business due to your own hard work and someone down the street has just been scammed for the third time this year, who would you rather be?