Are you looking for an online business opportunity but not sure if it is legal or not? There are lots of honest companies and many that are nothing but get rich quick scams.

Here are some points to determine if a business is legal or not.

The most important is that there must be a product or service involved. Be careful about what the opportunity is using for a "service." You want a company that has real products or services that distributors and retail customers would buy. There was a recent scam in which people only had to surf web sites for 10 minutes and by doing so they could pay for this "advertising" and get a 125% return on their investments. This site has recently been shut down.

A legal network marketing company only pays you commissions when people you enroll purchase a product or service. You do not make money simply for recruiting them. If an opportunity does pay for new recruits then its a pyramid. You will almost certainly loose money and it definitely isn't legitimate either.

You should be able to find the contact information for the business as well as know who the owner or owners are. You can verify that an address is correct using Google maps. If possible you want to find out the exact location to be sure its a building and not a "business" someone is running from their basement. An email address should be info@ABCcompany.com or something similar, not a hotmail, yahoo or other.

The name of the business can reveal quite a bit. If it has words like "easy cash" or "rich" or anything that implies get rich quick you are probably better off avoiding it. There are many well established network marketing companies. Melaleuca, Herbalife, XanGo, and Shaklee are examples of great businesses that have been around for several years and have stood the test of time.

So I strongly suggest you avoid the temptation of joining anything that promises easy money or little or no work. The way to success in network marketing is to align yourself with an established and proven company and take action.

Get rich quick only applies to people who win the lottery!