There is no denying in the tremendous increase in the number of online businesses in the past 10 years, not only in the USA, but just about any place where computers can be accessed easily.
As we all know that, among many online businesses run by good and honest people, there are some online businesses run by bad and unscrupulous people whose primary objective is to con money out of unsuspecting naive people who are desperately looking online for jobs due to their circumstances such as being a stay-home-parent with kids, wheelchair bound, or whatever their unique circumstances could be that made them think that online jobs made more sense.
I decided to look around online, about 2 years ago, after seeing so many popups about home based jobs such as paid online surveys, freelance jobs, etc to see if they were another one of online schemes to rip you off. After I signed up with many of them, of course I couldn't check all, and receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of junk emails from them I was able to tell which ones were good and bad.
As in real life, we have to be careful and take some precautions by finding out if there is a physical address of business or a phone number or even by checking it out on BBB.org (Better Business Bureau) online before typing in our sensitive information.