Fraudsters Using Bogus and Legitimate Recruitment Sites to Con Job-Hunters Into Laundering Money

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Fraudsters Using Bogus and Legitimate Recruitment Sites to Con Job-Hunters Into Laundering Money

By CircleID Reporter
November 16, 2009, 6:12 pm PST Views: 6,870 Comments: 1

Reported today on BBC: “Police chiefs are urging people looking for work during the recession to be alert to online scams that trick them into laundering money. The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) says websites are currently being used to recruit ‘money mules’. The ‘mules are ordinary people who send and receive payments through their bank accounts to facilitate business.”

Neil Schwartzman has also informed us of a related report by RSA FraudAction Research Lab based on several months of tracking various reshipping scams engineered by online fraudsters.

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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Hopefully police in other countries will start taking it seriously Coen Dijkgraaf – Nov 23, 2009 9:00 PM

Someone I know applied for a New Zealand job site and after giving their bank account details for their pay, they had a sum of money transferred in and asked to transfer it onwards. This rang alarm bells, and so they went to the local police station and spoke to the police, who told them that “no crime had been committed” as it wasn’t illegal for someone to transfer money into an account, even after trying to explain the concept of money mule to no effect. They then went and spoke to the bank, who was a lot more pro-active, and had already taken actions including freezing the account, they subsequently reversed the transaction as requested. It was also reported to the job site, but only a standard “we will investigate” e-mail resulted from that.
Hopefully once the bank completed their investigation they would have referred the details onto the police or the Serious Fraud Office.

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