Cents-off coupons are providing big bucks for scam artists who offer business opportunity and work-at-home schemes featuring Coupon Certificate booklets and coupon clipping services. Using the Internet to market these so-called opportunities, fraudulent promoters are promising entrepreneurs, charity groups and consumers earnings of hundreds per week and thousands per month simply by selling coupon certificate booklets or cutting coupons at home. The fact is that consumers and manufacturers are getting clipped in these costly—and deceptive—coupon capers.

There is only one legitimate way to use a coupon: Cut it out of the newspaper or other source and use it toward the purchase of the designated product. A coupon is meant to be used only by the consumer who buys the product for which the coupon is printed. Selling or transferring coupons to a third party violates most manufacturers’ coupon redemption policies—and usually voids the coupon.

Coupons are big business: More than 3,000 manufacturers distribute nearly 330 billion coupons—worth an estimated $280 billion—every year in an effort to help consumers save money. Indeed, it is thought that 77 percent of American households use some eight billion coupons to save $4.7 billion on their grocery bills.

Yet, fraudulent promoters are making money marketing and misrepresenting coupon-based business opportunities to unwary consumers and even savvy organizations.

Among the victims are:

• would-be entrepreneurs trying to run a business from home, people with otherwise limited income opportunities, and people just trying to make a living, who are losing savings and time and effort;

• charity groups, lured into selling coupon certificate booklets as fundraisers; and

• consumers who are dealing with complicated forms involving difficult procedures and handling fees to receive the same coupons manufacturers give away for free.