Internet Scam: Re-Shipping

Here is how this one works (it has several victims tied into it): a person applies for a job online, with some innocuous title, like shipping assistant or even administrative assistant. It is always with someone from outside the country and what they want to do is ship goods to you and send you labels, etc so you can ship them elsewhere. They'll have some half-plausible story as to why they need to do this.

But what you are really doing is receiving stolen goods that they have purchased with stolen credit cards and re-shipping those stolen goods elsewhere for them. Instead of a job, you are now partaking in a criminal activity.

And for the final slap in the face, the scammer will promise to pay you monthly but when the first paycheck date arrives, they will either dump you a day or two before or they will pay you with a fraudulent money order check and then disappear and seek their next "assistant". The authorities rarely find the scammer but do find the person or people doing the re-shipping. The other victim in this scam is of course the owner of the stolen credit card number as the scammer racks up purchases until that number is closed down and then they move on to the next stolen credit card number they have.

Today in the news, in Michigan, two couples in one town now face fraud charges for receiving stolen goods and shipping them elsewhere. The police thought the cases must be connected but it turns out they were not connected at all. Both couples had applied for online jobs and didn't realize what they were doing was a criminal activity. Their scammer said he was from India, but who knows where he really was from. The couples said they made about $200-$300 a month but "the man told police they had been reshipping packages for about a month and had not yet been paid." Classic. The police found out because the owners of the credit cards had reported the fraudulent purchases on their cards. At their home, the police opened packages that arrived from Hong Kong and in both cases of the couples, the purchases were iPads and computers. The other couple had packages waiting to be re-shipped to Russia.

Then it appears the one woman must have understood what was happening because her "employer" sent her a credit card in her name and she purchased a computer, 2 iPads, and paid some personal bills before "destroying the card". Huh. She must have known what she was doing was illegal. The other couple seem more clueless. The police charged the one couple who seem to know what they were doing with fraud and receiving/concealing stolen property and the investigation into the other couple is continuing.

So. There is no such thing as a legitimate online job where you are being asked to receive and then re-ship goods, or receive and re-mail money orders elsewhere, especially out of the country.