Everyone at one time or another has received spam e-mails promising high-paying jobs for part-time work at home. Unfortunately, at least three K-State students responded to such offers recently and almost became victims of fraud. The offer was simple and enticing:
Work from school/home and earn $300 weekly… each days job takes maximum of 50mins… you are not working every day, only when necessary… kindly get back to us ASAP if you care to know more about the job offer.
When the students responded, they were asked to provide their name, address, phone number, age, and gender. They then received in postal mail a check for nearly $2,000 and were instructed to cash it at their bank, keep $180 for themselves to cover “internet connectivity for the first month of your job” and send the rest to their “material supplier in Michigan.” Yeah, right. One student became suspicious before it got to this point and reported it. Two others tried to cash the bogus checks which were fortunately caught by alert Manhattan bank tellers and reported to the police.
Fortunately in these cases, the fraud was stopped in time. Others may not have been so lucky (and paid the “material supplier” from their own funds in their bank account). The lessons learned are numerous:
- This is a classic case of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Sensational offers like earning $300 per week working less than an hour a day are guaranteed to be false.
- Never provide personal information when you have not confirmed the validity of the request. Do an Internet search of the company name, the person supposedly sending the e-mail, and a key phrase from the e-mail subject or the body of the message. You’re likely to turn up reports of fraud. Also check with the Better Business Bureau where the company is located.
- The grammar in the original spam e-mail and the follow-up communications was very poor, obviously written by someone for whom English is not the native language. That’s incongruous for a supposedly Canadian company. Take the time to learn how to recognize scams.
- Never respond to unsolicited e-mails (i.e., spam), even if the offer seems legitimate, because we don’t want to encourage this form of “marketing” and more likely than not it’s a fraud.
If you replied to this scam or another like it, you should report it immediately to your local police department, especially if you received one of the fraudulent checks. You may also report Internet scams to the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, or the National Consumers League’s Fraud Center.
