Assembling pens or how not to look for work at home

Quick overview

• Work-from-home job offers like pen assembly are almost always disadvantageous or fraudulent.
• Typically, they ask you for an entry fee, you don’t get an employment contract, and you have to sell the products yourself instead of working.
• In a legal sense, this is not employment, but a business relationship – often bordering on fraud.
• If you have already paid, you can defend yourself by, for example, filing a criminal complaint or claiming damages.

If you’re not sure if you’ve fallen for a scam? Write to us about your situation and we will check everything out legally.

Pay first, sell later

If you’re looking for manual labor work at home, you’ve probably come across offers to assemble pens, stuff envelopes, assemble toys, or something similar. You may come across such ads on social media, job portals or directly on the employer’s website.

The advert seems solid and straightforward at first glance. A Czech company is looking for people interested in a simple job for which they can receive an above-average salary. The job is simple – you don’t need any experience or special skills. The company sends you the materials and you do some manual work in the comfort of your home, such as assembling pens, which you then send back ready-made.

If it worked like that, it would be a really great job. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality. This kind of work is nowadays taken care of by machine production, which is much faster and cheaper. So it doesn’t make sense for people to do this kind of work and have it sent directly to their homes. The whole principle behind these offers is something completely different.

Before you get the job, you have to pay an entry fee, which is supposed to serve as a kind of deposit for the materials. This fee ranges from a few hundred to several thousand This may seem fair enough. But after you pay the fee, you still don’t get the job. All you get is an initial package containing the materials and instructions. So not only will you have to assemble the products, but you will also have to sell them yourself, at your own expense and effort.

Requiring any entry fee for dependent work is contrary to the basic principles of labour law. If someone asks you to pay before the working relationship has even begun, it is usually not employment but a business relationship – or fraud.

Under the Labour Code, the employer, not the employee, bears the cost of performing the work. If someone asks you for payment before the employment relationship begins, it is not employment.

In some cases, it may even be a fraud offence if the intention is to extort money without any real performance.

You are not signing an employment contract, but a contract of sale. You are therefore acting as an entrepreneur when you sell, for which you need a business license. You therefore have no guarantee that you will actually earn anything. You will most likely end up paying a lot of money, wasting a lot of time and gaining nothing.

In practice, we encounter these cases quite often. Clients turn to us the moment they have already paid the initial fee and found out that there is no real work. The most common mistake is that people trust professional-looking websites or communications that look like they are from a Czech company, but in reality they are scammers or business model intermediaries with no real earnings.

If you have already paid a similar fee, we recommend that you address the situation as soon as possible – the sooner the case is resolved, the better your chances of getting your money back. An attorney can help you assess whether it makes sense to file a criminal complaint or lawsuit.

The court also dealt with one similar offer. It concerned Denis Vincek, acting under the company Truxa Group. He offered people simple work from home. However, he demanded payment of CZK 660 in advance for sending documents for the job. However, no work was done. Vinček earned around CZK 6 million and defrauded almost 20,000 people.

In similar cases we deal with, the problem is that the fraudsters use foreign accounts or anonymous payment gateways. Recovering the money is then more difficult, but not impossible, it always depends on the specific circumstances.

How not to fall for

• Read the terms and conditions: ask for the terms and conditions and read them carefully before you pay. You can already tell the true nature of the work being offered.
• Ask others: Try to find reviews or even ask other people about a particular company. For example, you can use Facebook groups for work-from-home jobs. Here you will probably find someone who has already had personal experience with the company.
• Don’t pay anything: It’s not common to pay anything upfront for a job, and this is true for work-at-home jobs as well. You should also be suspicious that there is no contract being signed and that, the company is constantly hiring new employees. Offers for manual work-at-home jobs are plentiful, so be wary of them.

Pyramid schemes

Another similar type of work from home that you should watch out for is so-called pyramid schemes. A pyramid scheme is a special business model that is illegal in many countries because in most cases it leads to financial losses.

This business model consists of recruiting as many people as possible for a particular job. The catch is that in order to start working, they must first invest a significant amount of money. The main purpose of their work is then to continue to recruit as many people as possible who continue to invest.

So the system clearly resembles the shape of a pyramid – the first person stands at the top and recruits those below with them. They then recruit more and more and the pyramid continues to expand.

Participants are promised a high return on their investment, but these returns are usually funded by the investments of the newly recruited people rather than the profits generated from any legitimate business activity. As the scheme grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit new members and those at the bottom of the pyramid often lose their investments.

Such offers are most often encountered on social media. In particular, Facebook groups for women on maternity leave are full of them. You can often find offers to sell drugs, sweets, vitamins or various diet products.

These adverts are usually addressed directly to ‘mums on maternity leave’ and contain only basic information. However, they often promise several thousand dollars a month for a few hours of work.

If you are not sure whether it is a pyramid scheme, it is better to have the situation assessed – a lawyer can quickly reveal whether it is a legal business or an illegal model.

How not to fall for

• Do your research: do your research on the company or person offering the job. Find reviews, discussions on the subject, etc. In most cases, you will find enough information and personal testimonials to help you make a decision.
• If someone promises you high earnings for minimal effort and risk, it’s probably not just that.
• Recruiting first: If the job offer emphasizes recruiting other members, it will most likely be a pyramid scheme.
• Requirement for initial investment: also beware if you are asked to make an investment to start with. This is not normal for standard job offers and indicates that it is likely to be a pyramid scheme or other unfair practice to get money out of you.

Phishing

Another phenomenon to watch out for when looking for work from home is phishing. This is a type of cyber attack in which attackers try to obtain your sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and so on. This is what they often choose to do with tempting work-from-home offers.

Phishing attacks are commonly carried out through fraudulent emails, messages or websites that look trustworthy at first glance. Attackers pose as legitimate employers or employment agencies to lure job seekers into providing personal information, financial details, or even payments for fake work-related expenses.

In addition, attackers often mimic real employers or agencies and their websites or emails are often almost indistinguishable from the original. It is therefore no wonder that phishing is becoming an increasing problem. In recent years, phishing has also become much more widespread thanks to the use of artificial intelligence. Fraudulent job offers now often contain language-free texts, professional-looking websites or even automated communications that respond to applicants’ queries in real time. This makes it all the more difficult to spot these scams.

How not to fall for

• Beware of spoofs: Phishing that tries to imitate real employers or employment agencies can be detected simply by checking the URL of the website or the address of the email sender. If it doesn’t match the real thing, you’re in the clear.
• Note the peculiarities: if it is a “genuine” company, however, then you need to involve your inner detective. Does the language the email or site uses seem odd to you? It is probably an automatic translation, which is typical for phishing. Urgency and limited offers are also often present. If an email or page seems suspicious, don’t open anything and especially don’t fill in anything.

Checklist: how to spot a fraudulent work-from-home job

You can spot suspicious offers by these signs:

• You must pay an entry fee.
• You don’t sign an employment contract.
• A high salary is promised for minimal work.
• The company wants you to sell the products yourself.
• Communication is done anonymously or through social networks.

Summary

In most cases, offers of work-from-home jobs such as completing pens, stuffing envelopes or “simple earnings without experience” are fraudulent or at least very unfavourable. Typical warning signs are the requirement of an entry fee, the absence of an employment contract and the attempt to transfer all business risk to the job seeker. These are often pyramid schemes or sophisticated scams, including modern phishing using artificial intelligence. If someone promises you high earnings for minimal effort, the utmost caution is in order. If you fall victim to such a practice, there are legal defenses, including filing a criminal complaint and making a claim for damages.