Working at home sounds very appealing.  No commute and you get to work in your pajamas.  What could be more convenient than that?  Years ago, stuffing envelopes was a common work at home scam. That scam has been updated by other scammers to offers of being paid to read emails, but it remains a scam.  The range of work at home scams is constantly changing and evolving, but the result is always the same – rarely are these work at home schemes legitimate nor do they provide any income except for the scammers who operate them.  Often the advertisements for these work at home scams appear in legitimate media that have not checked out the legitimacy of the advertisements they run.

In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic there has been an increase in scammers taking advantage of the situation by perpetrating work at home scams including one version of the scam, about which Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has issued a warning, that actually makes you an accomplice to a crime.  Your job is to receive goods, often electronics that have been shipped to you, inspect them and then 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.  The companies offering this type of work may seem legitimate, but they are not.  In other versions of work at home scams you will be charged a fee merely to apply for a job.  No legitimate company asks you to pay a fee to apply for a job.  In another common work at home scam, you are sent a check for more than what you are to be paid and requested to wire back the excess amount to the employer.  This is always a scam as the check is counterfeit and will bounce, but the money you wire to the scammer comes out of your account and is lost forever.

TIPS

As always, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.  Check out 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.   Also, never pay a fee to apply for a job.   As for reshipping scams, they are always a scam and you should steer clear of them.  Whenever you receive a check, wait for your bank to tell you that the check has fully cleared before you consider the funds as actually being in your account. Don’t rely on provisional credit which is given after a few days, but which will be rescinded once a check bounces.

For those of you receiving the Scam of the day through an email, I just want to remind you that if you want to see the ever increasing list of Coronavirus scams go to the first page of the http://www.scamicide.com website and click on the tab at the top of the page that indicates “Coronavirus Scams.”

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and click on the tab that states “Sign up for this blog.”