It’s really hard to trust legitimate job sources when the internet is being hammered with scams.

Personally, I have never been caught in an online job scam, but to be truthful, there were a few scam cases that I pounced upon and some were presented to me, but these tips that I am about to share with you, saved me and helped me to detect and avoid online job scam website.

1.Pay attention to the urls. Legitimate sites usually have a secure connection. If you look at the address bar you can determine if the connection is secure by looking if it’s HTTP or HTTPS.

HTTPS = Good/Secure

HTTP = Bad/Unsecure

Never trust an HTTP website with your personal information.

2. Check out the authenticity of the site. What is the site owner proposing or promising, is it unrealistic? Is it too good to be true?

Say for example, a site is promising you, $300 USD per day for 1000 captcha entries but you have to do 4000 captchas first.

Point #1: That may be too much money for something that simple. (This is arguable)

Point #2: There is a stipulation (minimum of 3000) and no escrow payment system in place (an amount deposited  and it is to be released upon completion of project).

So what if you do that 3000 and there is no payment protection (escrow) or no provisions made or system in place, all that hard work would be done in vain.

3. The look of the site. As corny as it may sound, scammy sites have a certain look at feel, flashy images, images showing a lot of money, etc

4. Consistency is another factor. If the site has contradictory information, that’s one thing to look for. If they say one thing here and concerning the same topic, they are saying something else…uh…their story isn’t straight.

It is possible that they edited/upgraded the site or made some changes and forgot to change something…humans make mistakes sometimes, but don’t rule it out until you’ve finished doing your due diligence.

5. Google is your best friend. Google is a detective’s best gadget. Google them and see what you can find out about them, see if there are any bad review about the site.

6. Browse through the site. Check them out… do they have an ‘About’ page so you can know more about the site or the company? Who is the Author of the site?

Majority of Legitimate sites have some information about the site owner/author (and maybe some sort of picture that shows you that there is a real person behind the site).

What about a privacy policy page or contact page? Is there any?

Also check to see if they have a facebook page or some other social media page, if there are a number of people that likes the page, that’s social proof, it shows that other people are aware of the site, and approves it.

7. Send a message. If you want to be sure that the site is legitimate, contacting the site owner is one way to do so. Ask some questions that you are concerned about.

There doesn’t have to necessarily be a phone number but there has to be some sort of way to contact the site owner and it shouldn’t be hard to find either.

I remember I was checking out a site that I wasn’t too sure about.

I contacted them via email, I got back a response, was timely too but I notice that the message was very generic, so I dug a little deeper and I asked some questions that I know only a human could answer.

Questions that were pertinent to their service offered, and the response I got again was of course that of an automated system because no human would ever respond like that.

So this is always a good way to detect online job scam sites.

Have some tips of your own, that I haven’t included? drop us a comment and let us know about it.