You’ve been looking for a job working from home. You’ve been careful, read through our guidelines on avoiding work from home scams and carried out plenty of research on the most common scams before sending off some money for what looks like a dream job. Unfortunately, the job you applied for turned out to be a work from home scam and you’ve been left out of pocket. So where do you go from here?

First of all, you need to do everything you can to prevent yourself from losing any more money to these con-artists. Look through your bank statements and see if any cash has actually left your account. If it has, contact your credit card company or bank as soon as possible to see if they can cancel the payment. Even if the money has left your account and it can’t be cancelled, at least make sure your financial services provider cancels any future payments to the person or company concerned.

It might be worth keeping an eye on your statements for a while after the incident as well. Your personal details could well have been compromised if they are in the hands of fraudsters, so stay alert!

Once you’ve recovered what money you can, and taken steps to prevent any further transfers, you can take a stand against work from home scams by reporting the crime. According to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), around 17 per cent of adults in the UK have been targeted by job scams. By informing the OFT of the company and adverts concerned, you can give the authorities the opportunity to take control of the situation and hopefully reduce the number of victims in the future.