As people become more aware of work-at-home job scams, the scammers get sneakier. “Webnapping” — the theft of corporate identities to make scams look legitimate — is quickly becoming one of their tools of choice.

Recently, this became clear when a webnapping scam ripped off an entire software company and many jobseekers as well. (We exposed the scam on video, with tips on how you can bust these scams too, at http://www.ratracerebellion.com/scamlock.html .)

In this case, the scammers harvested resumes that had been posted on job boards by people seeking home-based work. In a carefully crafted e-mail, they guided their victims to the “company’s” website for more information on their “job openings” (which in reality involved fencing stolen merchandise).

Their corporate website looked impeccably legitimate, with professional-grade graphics and layout, and pages devoted to the company’s products, vision, mission, and experienced executive team — complete with their photos.

The hitch? It was all bogus, stolen from real corporate websites.   

Scams are Like Mushrooms, Popping up Overnight

As many experienced Internet users will know, the people behind the scam will probably surface again somewhere else, until the authorities catch up with them and take action. Is that likely? Probably not, since the scammers may well be based in locations with insufficient resources to police Internet frauds effectively.

And unfortunately, that includes the U.S. During its first six months of operation alone — in 2000, before ID theft and other Internet fraud really “took off” — the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, created by the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, received more than 37.5 million hits to its website, and more than 20,000 complaints of fraud.

Nevertheless, the more the public learns about how to spot scams, the tougher it will be for the con artists to succeed. And when they don’t succeed, we do.

What You Can Do

The best way to keep track of the latest online scams is to go — where else? — online. We cover work-at-home scams in our own home-based jobs bulletin (subscriptions are free to the military community, at http://www.ratracerebellion.com/R3Military.html ), and a number of other websites carry ongoing discussions about the latest scams.

Here are a few links to get you started:

-- www.wahm.com Even though this site is for work-at-home moms, it’s useful for anyone working from home or seeking home-based work, as scams are regularly “outed” here. 

-- www.workplacelikehome.com Similar to wahm.com, with ongoing discussions about legitimate and bogus work-at-home jobs.

-- www.scambusters.org Carries detailed information on a wide variety of scams, home-based and otherwise.

-- http://www.ratracerebellion.com/spottingscams.htm More tips and links for spotting scams, in an article we posted last year. 

Don’t Let the Scammers Get You Down

As you search for virtual work, don’t let the scammers discourage you. The trend toward telework is growing. We’ve found well more than 4,000 legitimate home-based job leads in the past year alone, some seeking hundreds of workers, and global warming is sure to bring telework to the forefront of job opportunies. Companies like IBM, American Express, and Lockheed Martin, too, are adding their home-based openings to the myriad needs of smaller hirers.

With effective and persistent effort and a bit of luck, you’ll join the millions of other Americans who work wherever they choose, and when you do you’ll become just one more sad statistic — for the scammers, that is, because you knew their games.