You are not alone. Every year, millions of people fall prey to scams and fraud and just plain liars who try to sell you something, get you to divulge your personal information, or offer you a job that promises to pay you a lot for very little work. 

Every year, people believe these fraudulent offers, answer the questions, and lose money - more than 2.8 million people reported spotting a fraud, and one in four said they also lost money. 

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) releases a summary of fraud statistics annually. In 2021, 5.7 million people filed reports and described losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud — a $2.4 billion jump in losses in one year. You can learn about the types of fraud, identity theft, and marketplace issues people reported by state, and how scammers took payment — including $750 million in cryptocurrency — in the FTC’s new Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book. www.ftc.gov/exploredata 

Second only to identity theft scams are the “get rich quick” scams. 

Companies offering jobs, business opportunities, investments, or other money-making opportunities often talk about how much money you can make. But many people have lost time and money to companies that stretch the truth, leave out important details, or tell flat-out lies about the income people can make. This scam has grown so much that the FTC is considering issuing a new rule to address the use of false or misleading earnings claims.  

Here are some ways that scammers take advantage of you with fraudulent money-making schemes: 

• Work at home scams. Many people looking for an income are stay-at-home moms or people looking to quit their day job, which makes the money-making scam quite easy to target to a specific population. A work at home money-making scam usually requires you to pay a start-up fee to enroll in the program. The simplest scams involve craft assembly, emailing or sending information to potential company customers, or jobs for typing at home. Some of these scams might work for a month or so, but then either disappear or start to charge you more fees to continue. Some even ask you to engage in illegal behavior. 
• Internet "pay to surf" programs. This type of "work" requires that you pay a fee to access information on starting. The fee, which ranges from $20 to $100, is never made back, as it is almost impossible to find the opportunities promised. While some websites do pay for filling out surveys or answering an email, the pay is rarely over two or three cents, which means it would take you years to make the initial fee back. 
• Work at home money-making scams are done by promising riches to whomever signs for a specific program to work at home, and then only gets a list of "work at home" companies. The companies may be real, but there is no guarantee that they are looking for workers at any given time. You have just paid for a list you could easily have googled – for free. If you are looking for work, there are many internet sites that offer opportunities – it just takes a little more effort. Ask questions when things seem to come too easily. You shouldn’t have to pay to find work opportunities. 

Some other scams that emerged last year include one that targets Latinas with promises of big money selling luxury products — but both the promises and the products turned out to be fake; an operation that used illegal robocalls to trick older adults into a work-from-home scam; and a “blessing loom” (a type of pyramid scheme) that allegedly targeted members of the Black community who never made any money and lost the $1,400 they paid to the scammers. 

Another example is the scam that deceived people into believing that they could make a lot of money working but first they had to sign up for and pay for expensive real estate and investment coaching programs.  

If you’ve seen money-making offers that make big promises, have been misled by promises about the money you could earn by joining a multi-level marketing scheme or another program — or by claims about what you could make by working for a gig company or other employer, report it to both DCP and the FTC. 

To CT DCP:dcp.complaints@ct.gov. 

Or to:ReportFraud.ftc.gov or 1-877-FTC-HELP 

Remember, Pass it On to your friends, family, and neighbors! 

This article was written by Catherine Blinder, chief education and outreach officer of the Department of Consumer Protection of the State of Connecticut. To learn more about how the Department of Consumer Protection can help, visit us online at www.ct.gov/dcp.