The money laundering job scam has been around for years, but it's becoming especially chronic now. I saw a lot of cases during my work with the Bavarian Police (2002-2008) and back then there was a lot of media work to publicise the crimes and make sure people knew how to recognise the dangers.
So it surprises me to hear that many people are still being taken in by the scam. Honestly, in our day and age, is there any excuse for not being informed?
Basically it often looks like a job offer with a huge pay packet, and what they want you to do is receive money in your personal bank account and then send it offshore via wire transfer, after you've taken your "cut". But this is dirty money and what you are doing is laundering it, making it able to be used by the criminals. Often it is money from phishing and will be reclaimed from the unwitting "employee".
Here's an excerpt from the Herald article that talked about this recently:
As instructed, she opened an ANZ bank account. On her first day of work this month, she was asked to go downtown and wait near the bank.The whole article is here.
"Halemann" then called to say around $7100 was in her account, and she should withdraw it in cash, keep $350 as her bonus, and wire the rest via Western Union to a person in Ukraine, which she did.
Shortly after, $8080 more was deposited. She took out her bonus and sent the balance to Ukraine.
But a third attempt triggered ANZ's fraud detection, and the branch manager explained she was unwittingly laundering money which had been stolen in a phishing scam.
2 comments:
That definitely falls into the "If it sounds too good to be true..." category.
Yikes.
How do people not know it's a scam? Or is it that they don't want to know?
No legitimate business would ever operate that way.
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