Victim calls unwitting participant in scam

Victim calls unwitting participant in scam

By Greg Collier

We’ve discussed the reshipping or repackaging scam many times before. These scams start out as online job listings that have been placed by scammers. The ads will offer work at home positions with titles like ‘shipping coordinator’, ‘warehouse distribution coordinator, or ‘local hub inspector’. You’ll be ‘hired’ almost immediately without ever meeting your employers face to face. You’ll be instructed to receive packages at your home. Once you receive a package, you’ll be asked to photograph the contents before shipping the goods to their new destination. While the phony job is supposed to be seen as a form of quality control, what you’re really doing is sending fraudulently purchased items to people who will then sell the stolen items.

A woman in Utah recently applied for one of these phony jobs. She needed extra money to help pay off her student loan debt. She found the position on a legitimate job board. Furthermore, she was hired on as a ‘warehouse coordinator’ almost immediately. The woman was promised $2000 a month along with $40 for every package she shipped. All she had to do was print off shipping labels that the job would send to her and take the packages to the post office. The woman then received an angry phone call from someone accusing her of buying items with the caller’s stolen credit card. When the woman spoke with her new employer they told her that calls like this were ‘normal’. That’s when the woman realized she was part of a scam.

This woman was lucky she got out when she did. More often than not in the reshipping scam, the unwitting reshippers are often paid with fraudulent checks. Some of these reshipping operations are so sophisticated that they have official looking web portals where the reshippers can report their hours and progress.

There’s also another hazard to this scam besides lost wages and angry phone calls. Reshippers can sometimes be arrested for their roles even if they didn’t know it was a scam. If you knowingly falsify shipping documents under the instruction of the scammers to get around US customs, you could potentially face some jail time.

Please keep in mind that reshipping jobs aren’t a thing. There are no legitimate reshipping jobs.