Then I started receiving emails from people wondering why I was sending emails about a business opportunity.” I got a message from Google saying they noticed suspicious activity and suggesting I change my password, which I did. “I signed in to view it and it was a pointless press release. “I got an email saying my sister had sent a document in Google Drive,” David explained later. Instead, he'd fallen for a phishing scam, and the phisher then managed to spoof his account, sending emails allegedly from him to every email in his address book, including mine. And I'm extremely lucky the email only contained a scammy job offer, rather than dangerous malware or worse.īecause, of course, David never sent that email at all. Though familiar with advance-fee scams in general, I hadn't known about the specific car-wrap variant until yesterday, when I received an email supposedly from a friend (whom I'll call “David” because that actually is his name).Ĭonfession: In hindsight it was very careless of me to immediately open an email, just because I thought I recognized the sender. If you do this, then a couple of days later your bank will tell you that the deposited check is no good and has no funds backing it up - and any money you withdrew from your own account to send to that “third party” is gone. Your “boss” tells you to deposit it into your own bank account, keep some of the money for yourself, then use a wire transfer or some other untraceable method to send the remainder of the balance on to a third party. But the check is for considerably more money than your own supposed salary. What do these varied people scattered all over the country have in common - and what do part-time housekeeping, childcare, personal assistant and “test shopping” gigs share with the car-advertising opportunity I supposedly got yesterday? Advance-fee scamsĪdvance-fee job scams work like this: the scammer, your “new boss,” sends you a check that looks real – in Ryan's case, an apparent payroll check drawn on a account at Chase Bank, which the scammer sent from Boston via FedEx. In April, we shared the story of Suzanne in Hawaii, who thought she'd found a part-time job cleaning houses, and then Kelly in Virginia posted a comment on that story about a similar nanny position she'd been offered. Then Kevin commented on Ryan's story to report landing a similarly scammy job as a Walmart “test shopper.” Earlier in July we told you about Ryan in California, who initially thought he'd landed a job as a personal assistant to an interior designer. Here at ConsumerAffairs, especially in the past few months, we've heard from lots of job-hunting people who warned us about various advance-fee fraudsters they've encountered. The “car wrap” scam is a new-ish twist on the old bad-check or advance-fee scam an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Consumer and Business Education posted a warning about it in July 2013. Yesterday I got an email from a friend offering an amazingly lucrative part-time job opportunity (and who couldn't use extra money in this economy?) - $350 per week, and all I have to do is let an energy-drink company put advertising decals on my car! Unless I don't have a car, in which case I can use a bicycle instead.
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