When searching for legitimate work from home opportunities, it can be useful to evaluate the genuineness of the opportunity in terms of what the program consists of and how reasonable its income claims are.
I have found that most work at home programs are not blatant scams.
What is most often the case is that the merits of the program tend to be exaggerated to encourage sales.
Of course, there are some true scams out there.
These usually involve self-replicating websites, pyramid schemes, and matrix programs.
Each of these has in common the fact that that they aren't selling anything of real value.
They are built upon the idea of layers of people selling the right to take part in the program to others and earning money from the collective efforts of those they have sponsored into the program.
Most work at home programs fall into the category of what I consider to be "soft fraud.
" In "soft fraud," the programs can and do work but which would take considerably more effort and capital to be as profitable as the merchant claims them to be.
With these programs, it boils down to merchants and affiliates over-hyping their program in an effort to make sales rather than a sham designed to do nothing else but enrich the program creator and his or her collaborators.
Also included in "soft fraud" but bordering on actual fraud are the programs that mislead you as to what,  in fact, they are.
A classic example of this is ninety percent of the "online data entry jobs" you see advertised everywhere.
You are lead to believe that you will be paid for entering data into an online form, when in fact the form you will be filling out is the Google AdWords ad submission form to write an ad for a product you will be marketing as an affiliate.
Now, affiliate marketing is a perfectly legitimate way to earn money online, and many people do in fact earn a decent income from affiliate marketing.
However, affiliate marketing has nothing whatsoever to do with data entry and nothing in these programs remotely resembles an actual data entry job.
When searching for ways to make money online it isn't always possible to avoid soft fraud.
You can mitigate against it by doing some research about the program you're thinking of joining.
Make sure you know what is involved and how much time, effort, and capital will be required of you to make a decent profit.