And now, a scam in cyber space!

Read this for starters. “Dear reader, if you are dissatisfied with your income, your lifestyle, or your chances for a better future, you can learn how to start your own home-based business and be your own boss – and we will help you! …. Some impressive incomes (sic) can be reached without risks with a minimal investment. On average (sic) the involved people will reach a monthly income of $2,000 $4,000 before the end of the first year”!

This is just a sample of one such tempting e-mails that may land in your inbox, if it did not already, from the self-proclaimed ‘work from home’ company. But wait. Before you jump, check out the company’s credentials. Or you may end up losing your money as well as your morale after burning the midnight oil for many days, as happened to Sunil, a graduate hailing from the Kottayam district of Kerala.

“I was looking desperately for a job when I got this mail. I did not think twice as I found it very convincing, may be in my desperation, to earn some money so that I won’t be anymore a burden on my parents. Now, not only I lost my money and spent many hours of my labour, I have become a laughing stock at home,” says he.

Like him, thousands of educated, unemployed youths across the country are falling prey to such irresistible offers by work from home companies, which have been sprouting of late on the net space like mushrooms after a rain.

Slowly, a scam is spreading on the internet like wildfire that may beat its predecessors like goat farms, money chains, teak plantations and multi-layer marketing agencies, in magnitude with a wide margin. To get a glimpse of it, log onto forum.onecentre.com or creationcentre.com. You can browse through hundreds of pages written by the victims of this new fly-by-night-operators narrating their harrowing experience and how the companies perpetrated the cruel joke on them.

The modus operandi of most of the operators are same. Claiming to be promoted by young entrepreneurs who dared to dream, most of these companies presents themselves as data base compilers who are on the look out for partners in progress. And once the gullible ones bite the bait they will be robbed off money ranging anywhere between Rs 4,000 and Rs 6,000, and labour, before even they realise.

“They will sell you some programme or a CD containing data for which you have to pay anywhere between Rs 2,000 and Rs 4,000. They will promise you a return much higher than what you spent once you finish the work ‘satisfactorily’. The last word is the operating phrase as you can never satisfy them,” says another victim, who does not wanted to be quoted. Once the job is done and sent the communication stops completely.

Since India does not have cyber laws that prevent anybody from sending such enticing mails, the culprits go scot free in the end. “We don’t even have a law that prevents spam mails. We actually follow some US laws which says any mail with a return ID is not a spam mail. But the US has other laws that prevent the breaking of this kind of scams,” says a cyber cafe owner in Chennai.

“In India, with such high incidence of educated unemployment, jobs are a hot commodity. They are easy to sell. The new concept of work from home and earn as you work can cast a magical spell on the minds of the jobless, gullible youths who have little hope of otherwise getting a job or source of income,” says a government official adding “many such instances were not reported, and we can act only on reported cases.”