Job seekers beware: Reshipping scams on the uptick
Early in the pandemic, Krystelle Goodman lost her job as a sales consultant at Zales Jewelers in Dearborn, Mich.
Goodman, 35, scoured online sites like Indeed for potential jobs and didn’t find anything. Around June, she received an email out of the blue, supposedly based on her online resume, for what seemed like the perfect work-at-home opportunity.
Job hunters are warned to watch out for promises of high pay for re-shipping goods that arrive at your home. You aren’t likely to be paid and you’re often helping crooks sell stolen goods on the black market.
She was to receive packages for customers who were somehow in a country that wasn’t able to access Amazon to sell their products.
The packages were sent to her home.
Her duties: Open the box to confirm the item arrived in good shape and go online to get a shipping label. Then, she was to print that label on her printer and repackage the item in a new box to send elsewhere. Finally, she’d get in the car and haul the package somewhere like a Federal Express office or United Parcel Service to ship.
Some boxes had $50 ice buckets for champagne. Some had parts for Ski-Doo snowmobiles.
The boxes kept arriving and she didn’t mind since she was to be paid $50 for each package she shipped.
She was supposed to wait one month to be paid. But she didn’t receive a dime after shipping 22 packages over a month’s time.
Looking back, she said, she might have been suspicious when the company hired her without doing any background check on her to make sure that she was trustworthy and wouldn’t just keep their items.
She never talked with anyone — all communication was by email.
Consumer watchdogs are warning of an uptick in jobs scams, such as reshipping scams.
“A lot of the time they claim to be from a business that actually exists; other times they will make up a business name and website,” said Ashley Gibbard, marketing coordinator for the Better Business Bureau serving Eastern Michigan.
“These jobs are always remote and claim to pay very well, which makes them appealing to applicants.”
Many times, victims discovered a job on a popular site, such as LinkedIn, Indeed or Craigslist. Or the scammers troll sites looking for victims who have their resumes listed on these sites and then the scammer might say the potential victim’s resume is a good fit for a job opening at their company, according to the BBB.
The phony jobs use fancy titles, such as a “shipping coordinator” or “logistics manager” or “package processing assistant” or “package handler.” No one is going to advertise, of course, that we need someone to assist in laundering stolen merchandise.
The Indeed website warns: “During the holiday season, scammers might also seek gift wrappers. In this variation of the reshipping scam, you’d receive a package at your home, gift wrap it and then reship it.”
But the site notes that “there are no legitimate work opportunities that involve receiving packages and shipping them to someone else from your home.”
As much as many people might be eager to pick up extra work during the holiday season, it’s important to recognize that scammers are willing to take advantage of anyone who is looking for a job.
“I don’t think a lot of people know about this,” Goodman said, adding that these types of job openings are “100% bogus.