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Once new work from home scam is a variation on a check overpayment scam that has been going on for some time. In that scheme, someone who is selling something, perhaps on eBay, receives an offer to buy. The buyer then sends a cashier’s check for payment, but the check is for more than the amount of the purchase. The sender asks the seller to cash the check and to send the difference back, along with the merchandise. The seller does so, only to find out later that the check was a forgery. He or she is forced to repay the money to the bank and they have also lost their merchandise.
This new work from home scheme is very similar. Once would-be victim received an e-mail message from someone in Europe offering work. The pay was good; the e-mailer was offering several thousand dollars per week as a “distributor” of his company’s products. As a show of good faith, the company sent the recipient several money orders, drawn from a large bank and totally several thousand dollars. The recipient was asked to deposit those money orders, and after keeping 10% as a fee, to wire the rest of the money back to the sender. The problem, as in the scam above, is that the money orders are forgeries. U.S. banking laws require that such checks and money orders be credited to the account of the person making the deposit within ten days. Sometimes, however, it takes much longer than that for the forgeries to be discovered. If the victim has wired the money elsewhere in the meantime, he or she will be responsible for paying the bank back for the lost sum.
These sorts of schemes are popping up more and more often as people who cannot resist the idea of getting a lot of money for little or no work find participation in these schemes hard to refuse. As long as people are greedy, scams like this will flourish. The usual warnings apply here. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And after all, why would someone send you a check to cash when they could just cash it themselves?
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