HotJobs For Scammers!

Scams

from the a-monster-of-a-fake-opportunity dept

We first posted about scammers (often those same Eastern European organized crime groups who are having so much fun with spam and phishing operations) using job boards like Monster and HotJobs to recruit suckers to launder money for them a year ago. Now, however, the NY Times has picked up on the story and it looks like (as these things are known to do) the scam has changed a bit. Last year, the scammers would hire unsuspecting rubes to ship packages to Eastern Europe. They would claim to be a shipping company that was hiring people in the US in their spare time to pass on the packages. Lots of people fell for it. The latest trick, though, is for the scammers to claim to be software companies in Eastern Europe looking to accept payments from US customers – and thus, in need of someone in the US to handle their “payment processing.” They post these ads on the job boards and when people answer them, they’re expected to receive payments into their personal PayPal account and then send the money to Eastern Europe. Of course, what happens is that PayPal/eBay eventually notices an awful lot of money going into this account and is alerted that it’s from stolen credit cards. The sucker who’s been passing on the money is told they need to pay it back to PayPal while the folks in Eastern Europe invest in more ads on these job boards. The article mostly focuses on the fact that those tricked are angry at the job websites for not protecting them against such frauds. Some are worried that these types of frauds may end up damaging the reputations of the job sites. While that is a risk, I still can’t believe anyone would ever agree to process payments into their personal account and send it on to Eastern Europe without suspecting something was not right.