"Eat Pizza and loose 30 pounds! Quit smoking in 7 days! Earn money assembly jewelry from home!" Any of these sound familiar? Are you bombarded daily with scams and rip offs? If you're like me, you are probably reminded of the saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is."

As someone involved in the business if jewelry art, I'm especially concerned with the "make jewelry at home" cons that are so prevalent. Sure, we'd all love to make jewelry, send it off to someone, and get paid to do that from home, and I'm not saying that this isn't possible. I've worked with other artists before doing something just like that, but I did this with people I knew very well before entering into a working relationship with them. These people also knew me. They knew my skill level and they knew they could trust me. To consider entering into a partnership with someone you don't know and with someone who may ask you to pay her money first is when things get tricky. At a time like this, a red flag should immediately go up, but many jewelry makers are so enthusiastic about their love of the craft that they ignore these flags. The con-artists know this, and this is what they are hoping for.

How do the cons get away with this? How do they make money from it?

There are a few ways these jewelry scams work. One method is for a company to advertise for jewelry assemblers. Then when you contact them, they tell you that you will buy the materials from them (perhaps in kit form), and then after you assemble the pieces, they will buy them back from you for more money. You may receive the supplies, but when you try to sell them back, either the company has disappeared or you are told that your finished pieces are not of high enough quality, so they refuse to buy them back from you. The result is that they've made money by selling you supplies, and you have a bunch of jewelry that you need to figure out how to sell by yourself.

Another scam is one I read about in the paper, and I'm glad to say that the company got caught. The owner received a 14 year prison sentence, but this is only after he scammed 16,000 people and made $90 million dollars.

His setup was what is called a Ponzi scheme. Participating jewelry makers bought jewelry kits (which where about 300% more than they were worth) and returned the completed pieces to the company. The first batch of jewelry makers where paid with money from new participants. Obviously, you can't keep doing this because eventually there's no money for the new participants. Also, after selling the over-priced kits, the company then sold many of the jewelry pieces. Therefore, the company made money by selling the kits and selling the jewelry too.

This was an international operation, and unfortunately, one of many. I get a lot of emails from novice jewelry makers asking about these "work from home" deals, so I thought it was about time to talk about them. So, what's the alternative? Cut out the middleman. Buy your own supplies and sell your own jewelry. You can find out more information about the business of jewelry making under my Business/Trends section.

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