Pennsylvania State Police are warning people about reshipping scams, however these scams are found everywhere.  Reshipping scams sound appealing.  You get to work at home and all you have to do is receive goods your new employer sends you, which are often electronics, inspect them and reship them to an address provided to you by your new employer.  The problem is that these goods have been purchased with stolen credit cards and you have just become an accomplice to the crime when you ship them to someone else who will then sell them to turn the merchandise into cash.  The term scammers use to describe the people doing the reshipping is a “mule” and it can get you into a lot of trouble.  It makes you an accomplice to the crime and participating in money laundering.   The companies offering this type of work may seem legitimate, but they are not.   Often the advertisements for these work at home scams appear in legitimate media that have not properly checked out the legitimacy of the advertisements they run so you can’t rely on the fact that the advertisement  appears in a trusted media source.

TIPS

As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.  Check out any work at home scams with the big three – your local attorney general, the Better Business Bureau and the FTC.  And as always, you can Google the name of the particular company offering you the work at home program with the word “scam” next to it and see what turns up.  You also can use Google Earth to look into the physical address of the potential employer to see if it matches what the advertisement and communications with this employer indicate.  As for reshipping scams, they are always a scam and you should steer clear of them.