With the rise of the Internet, work-at-home scams have morphed from false promises of easy money to real threats of jail time.

Mundane varieties have always been promoted in small type in Popular Mechanics and women’s magazines and on lampposts. Old school work-at-home scams, such as envelope stuffing and medical billing pyramid schemes, were (and still are) more “get less poor” than “get rich quick” enticements.

But with the wildfire of social media, the would-be rewards and potential personal disasters have become eye-popping. Instead of offering prospects in the low hundreds of dollars, fraudsters dangle thousands all at once.

Instead of going after hundreds of dollars in fees from victims, the perpetrators use them as unsuspecting prey for identity theft and work with accomplices in money laundering and criminal bank fraud.

An Internet keyword search for “work from home” results in more than 1,000 listings.

Unsuspecting victims fill out employment applications with a treasure trove of personal information, including names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, said Patricia Oliver, fraud operations leader for identity theft protection services company IDT911. These scams have infiltrated legitimate job sites, she noted. She added that most consumers who have been victimized by work-at-home schemes found their jobs on Craigslist.

“We get a lot of calls from people who fall for this scam,” she said. “They are told they got a job and receive their first paycheck for $2,500. But the scammer instructs them to keep only $500 and return $2,000 to another location. Once victims deposit the check and follow the instructions, they’re done for.”

A Monster.com spokesperson acknowledges that fraudster job ads also surface on that company’s site Jobs.Monster.com, which is aimed at the home-bound.

While he said Monster can’t prevent every bogus operator from listing there, he noted the company looks more closely at ads for work-at-home employers because of their long history of scams.

“We have a much more mindful eye,” he said.

He added that fraudster work-at-home ads are also a danger in phishing sites that only pretend to be Monster.com.

In many cases, people who have paid fees to get home jobs are told they won’t be paid because the work wasn’t up to snuff, according to a Federal Trade Commission podcast.

The most recent surge in work-at-home scams is perhaps the most insidious because newer scams actually turn victims into criminals.

In a scam called “card cracking” or “card popping,” fraudsters ask their victims for their debit cards and security codes. They take money out and send part of the money back, then have the cardholder call her bank and claim the transaction wasn’t authorized so she gets back what she had in the bank plus the money the scamster promised to send her.

In another variation, the scamsters use the debit card to make a phony deposit and take the money out immediately before the bank realizes the check deposited was a fake.

Again, the fraudster promises to send the victim money -- but never does.

The bank computer systems often detect the crime, however. Even when the victims don’t go to jail, they can be seriously penalized for a lifetime by being accomplices to the frauds, cautioned Susan Grant, a director at the Consumer Federation of America.

“They’re never going to be able to open another bank account anywhere because bank account abuse is being shared among financial institutions,” Grant said.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has taken a lead role in ferreting out card cracking because some of the activity in the crimes is done through the mail.

Details about the agency’s work in attacking card cracking and warnings to victims will be shown October 3 to children in the first episode of a new CBS series on the inspection service.

The series, called The Inspectors appropriately enough, will air weekly on Saturdays from 10:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. EST.

Doug Johnson, a senior vice president at the American Bankers Association who focuses on cybersecurity, said millennials (particularly jobless students), and low-paid enlisted military workers are the chief targets of card crackers.

While card cracking losses have not reached astronomical sums, Johnson said a large number of banks are taking measures to stop the practice using technology and publicity.

The message needs to get out, he said, that the promoters showing off an attractive lifestyle on their social media sites probably really aren’t living in luxury.

One of the advantages of card cracking for fraudsters is that the victims, having been fleeced, are unlikely to tell financial institutions or the police, since the victims might also have participated in the theft.

Johnson’s advice: tell.

“Be up front with your bank. You might be able to salvage that relationship. You may not,” he said.