Home-Based Data Entry Work: Scam or Legitimate?

How do you find legitimate data entry work? How do you tell the real jobs from the scams?

We receive more queries on this topic than almost any other, and unfortunately that’s why there are so many scams in the data entry field — the demand for work far exceeds the advertised supply. Desperation, too, often plays a painful role.

Many people just want to find part-time work or occasional projects they can do at home for a reasonable wage. No Ph.D. or MBA or expensive IT certifications required, just some basic work to help pay the bills. Darkening the landscape, however, is credit card debt. Easy introductory rates soon give way to heavy monthly minimums, and families everywhere are struggling with the burden — especially during the holiday season. This creates desperation, and desperation is the scammer’s favorite word.

The Offshore Outsourcing Factor

In the corporate world, data entry is considered a “back office” or “business process” function. The outsourcing of business processes — or BPO, as it’s known — became an established trend long ago (that’s the good news), but a great deal of it goes to India, the Philippines, and other developing nations rather than to home-based workers in the United States, where labor costs are higher (the bad news).

And while it’s true that some call center work is returning to North America and being given to home-based agents (the “homeshoring” movement, which we covered in our last article), we haven’t yet seen a comparable trend in data entry tasks.

Where to Find Work

Not all businesses, however, have sent their back office work to India, and a significant amount remains. Smaller businesses in particular make up a large potential pool of back office or administrative work, with lawyers, Realtors ™, dentists and similar service providers in the mix. (You’ll have to be proactive, though, to win their business, with at minimum a basic website and an effective marketing plan.) Their contact information can be found through Google searches, trade associations such as the National Association of Realtors (http://www.realtor.org), or the chambers of commerce.

Other legitimate companies and organizations hire home-based data entry and other administrative workers on a periodic or ongoing basis, and our own research has identified 25 of these. (For details, see http://www.ratracerebellion.com/jobs-admin.htm.)

Spotting Scams and Bad Deals

Scammers continually refine their techniques, and it would be a mistake to underestimate them. However, they often give themselves away in their efforts to grab your attention and “make the sale.” Here are a few quick ways to spot the bad apples. (For more, see our article “Work-at-Home Scams,” at http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,146203,00.html.)

-- The job lead arrives as spam in your e-mail. (Helpful hint: These ads should simply be deleted. If you reply asking that your email address be removed, you’ve just confirmed to the spammer that your address is “live,” and you’ll get more spam.)

-- The promised income is unreasonable for the work involved. (Data entry work rarely pays more than $10-$15 per hour, so don’t let yourself be taken in by promises of thousands of dollars for “just a few hours of work per week.”)

-- The ad features palm trees, a mansion, a Ferrari, etc. (Administrative assistants may have “come a long way,” but it’s still not known as a route to riches.)

Other offers might not be classified strictly as scams, but give poor value for money. One we often see is the “pay for stale job leads” arrangement, where the buyer is promised a list of job leads or companies that hire data entry and similar workers. When the list arrives, it contains outdated job ads, companies no longer in business, non-functioning web links, etc.

In the end, as with any job, data entry work comes down to focused efforts, research, and making the right choices. There are more than 20 million small businesses in the United States alone, and the vast majority has never been asked to outsource their administrative work. Gather your courage, pop the question, and the job may be yours.