One stay-at-home mom takes the steps to investigate a recent job offer. Follow the steps she takes in trying to piece together the puzzle of this perhaps "up and coming" company, and use these tools and tips in investigating any online work from home opportunity to save yourself time, money and energy down the line on an opportunity that is definitely "too good to be true."

Having been duped by one company in the past, I am very suspicious when I see work at home jobs. Being a stay-at-home mom, I know I am pulling my weight in the house in other aspects with child care, cleaning, errand running, etcetera, but it's also nice to know that there are work from home opportunities out there that exist. The only thing is, how do you find the good ones?

You hear about work from home scams all the time on the local and national news. Especially with the downturn in the employment world, everyone is looking for a way to make a buck, whether it be by honestly trying to apply for a work from home opportunity or if it's by trying to scam those out there that are.

That being said, I received an email from a company this morning that I sent a quick application email to a week or so ago. I had totally forgotten, and here I get an email and an employment application, stating that I meet their requirements and they need a full resume. Of course, this resume is asking for a lot of sensitive data, including my social security number.

I believe I had run across the link to the site from a Facebook ad, but I don't specifically remember. I remember just sending a vague email to them asking for more info on the job, not actually sending a resume or whatnot. Of course, somehow, by asking them a question about the position, I met their hiring requirements...Also, they specify no phone calls, faxes, just emails. Any company should want to talk to you on the phone if truly interested in hiring.

If that wasn't fishy enough...I had never heard of this particular company before. So here are some steps I took to look into the business to find out more. These steps apply to researching pretty much any work from home opportunity online.

GOOGLE

Up-to-date information has never been easier to find than now. With the capabilities of the Internet and the quick compiling of new webpages by Google, you have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Using it, on the other hand, is up to you.

The first thing I did to look into this company was Google them. Instead of finding direct links to their website, I found posts on Yahoo! Answers asking if they are legit or not. Apparently, all in the same day, people have received this email from this company and the employment application attachment. Okay, so maybe they are just doing some mass hiring this morning, no biggie. But, when I did a search on Google between the dates of January 1, 2009 to October 1, 2009, nothing came up. If this company had a real background, wouldn't they have had SOMETHING posted on them within the last ten months. So then I got to wondering, how long has this domain been up?

It appears as though the company has posted "job openings" on CraigsList, Indeed.com, all over the internet. And what concerns me is that all of these job postings have been recently posted for all sorts of locations around the US. That is definitely one big hiring spree...

USING WHOIS.COM

WhoIs.com is an excellent resource for finding out who owns a domain, when it was registered and when it expires. By doing a quick search of the company website on WhoIs.com, I found that the website appears to have been registered on October 20th of this year...a little over a week ago...

BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU

You know them. The company you can trust, the company you can turn to to find out if businesses and charities are real. So of course, I headed over to BBB.org to see what else I could find on this company. Of course, whether I searched by phone number, website, fax number, address, etc, no results were found. But that's not necessarily unusual if a) they have not signed up to be a BBB accredited business or b) there have been no complaints filed against them. So I continued...

SECRETARY OF STATE BUSINESS SEARCH

There were two addresses posted on their website, one in California and one in Idaho. I went to the California Secretary of State website, as well as the Idaho Secretary of State website, and did a search for them on both. Come to find out, in neither state the company is registered. Grant it, they may be registered in a totally seperate state, but either way, the info, or rather, LACK of info, was a little bit concerning.

THE WEBSITE

So of course, they have a website.  It appears very professional, well maintained, etcetera. They have references from other companies on their site, they state on their about us page that they were established in 1989 and online since 1998. Of course, the information I found regarding the registration of this site did not match, so a red flag was immediately raised.

Their employment page differs strongly from the rest of their website. It has grammatical and spelling errors, is not properly aligned on the screen, and seems highly out of place for such a "professional" website. But then, you look down at the bottom of the page where it states that the website design and whatnot is provided by Intuit Website Services. You click the link and you are automatically taken to intuit.com. And what do you find? Website template services! I clicked to check out some of templates available, and quickly found the template that their site uses on their website gallery page. With a quick click to see an example, I was led to a sample template, with surprisingly, the exact same text, the exact same images and even the exact same testimonials.

PICKING UP THE PHONE

So my next, and last, step was to actually call the phone number. I figured if I called the company and spoke with SOMEONE, I could have them perhaps give me some verifiable background on their company, instead of me giving THEM background on me. Show me yours and I'll show you mine. I grabbed my phone, called the number and was immediately sent to an automated voice directory. Although given numerous options, including the option to wait on the line to speak to a representative, no matter what option I chose, I was either given a generic voice mail box to leave a message or, even worse, was immediately disconnected. Wait on the line to speak to a representative? Nope. The call was disconnected. Speak with human resources or sales? Nope, no one there. Press five if you're an employee of the company? Wonderful, but you'll have to leave a message. Speak with the legal department? They're "on the phone" so leave a message. No matter what option you choose, there appears to be no way to get a real person on the phone.

After spending just thirty minutes doing this research, I quickly decided that a company with this many faults couldn't possibly be a reliable company to work for. I am not saying the company is a scam by any means, but by doing my research, I have decided that this is definitely not a company I want to be giving my personal information to, let alone taking time out of my day from my kids to pursue.

Sara Haley is the author of the oDesk eBook, How to Make Money on oDesk: Getting Started as a Freelance Writer.  She has been writing freelance and working online jobs for over ten years and had had much success with freelancing websites such as oDesk.  She is a stay-at-home mother to two in Nebraska.