I am currently employed full-time as an HR administrator. To earn extra money I decided to try one of those "work at home" jobs that are all over the internet. I received an email right after New Years with the subject line "New Year's Resolution-Work At Home". I opened the email which was a video of when this company, "The Internet Data Entry Institute" which from the watching the email video had been featured on NBC 10 news by Channel 10's consumer reporter Tracy Davidson who does stories about different work at home jobs. Although I didn't actually watch the news when The Internet Data Entry Insitute was featured, but I figured this company must be legitimate since the emailed video couldn't have been fake. It was a $97 investment to sign up and work for this company (a savings from the regular $197) which included a manual that I would receive in 7-10 days after signing up & telephone coaching sessions. So my mother and I both paid the $97 to sign up. After we entered our debit card #'s we were given our user id's which were our email addresses and a password which was generated by The Internet Data Entry Insitute. I logged in immediately and found there were several different work at home positions you could choose from. My mother and I were interested in the data entry. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this website provided step-by-step instructions for setting up a click bank account and a hop link. Even though I had access to these step by step instructions I decided to wait for the manual to come in the mail to be on the safe side...I didn't want to make any mistakes. The day after I signed up I received a phone call from a # I didn't recognize, and I wasn't able to answer my cell phone because I was at my regular full-time job. The caller did not leave a voicemail. So I called the # back during my lunch break and found the call came from ICI Success which is a company who provides the training for The Internet Data Entry Institute. I told the woman who answered the phone that I wanted to wait for my manual to come in the mail before I started my training, and I asked her if that would pose any problems and was told that it wouldn't and to call back when I was ready. I logged into my account at The Internet Data Entry Institue's website several times to check it out and decided to print the step by step instructions to familiarize myself with the instructions while I was waiting for my manual to arrive in the mail. About a 8 days after I paid the $97 sign up fee I received a call from my mother who told me that she tried to log in to The Internet Data Entry Institute's website but she wasn't able to and said there was a message which read they were experiencing temporary problems and were working to resolve this problem. I didn't think much of it since I know websites can go down during maintenance and updates. So I tried to log in again the next day and got the same message my mother did. I also tried to call the 800# I received with my confirmation email after paying the $97. The 800# was continually busy. I tried the # the "trainer" called me from and an automated message came on which said "all representatives were busy helping other clients. Send all inquiries to [email protected]. I tried to send an email to ask what was going on, but my email would not send and a message came up which read the email address was not valid. I continued to try logging in and calling the 800# for a few days and then I read something that came up when I googled The Internet Data Entry Institute which said that The Internet Data Entry Institute was a scam and this person had paid $97 and never received the promised manual and the website had been down for over a week. My mother never received her manual in the mail either. She called her bank and had cancelled her debit card. She was told there were a lot of these scams going around lately. I also called my bank and was told the same thing. My mother and I were told we would most likely get our $97 refunded to us.

Although $97 is not a large amount of money...the fact that I was scammed was a rude awakening of the evil people that lurk online waiting to take advantage of another unsuspecting person trying to make a couple extra bucks.

The lesson I learned is that not everything you see on the internet is real regardless how it's presented, and nobody should ever pay even a $1 to work for somebody that is going to be paying you for working for them.