Wanted: Swindlers’ assistants
Money mules help international criminals move ill-gotten gains
After the fitness center where Denise Newton worked closed down in April because of the coronavirus, she posted her résumé online to look for a new job. She soon got a call from a company she had never heard of.
The woman who phoned from the company, Heies, invited Newton to apply for a job as a “local hub inspector.” When she started work in May, Newton began receiving boxes with Apple Watches and laptops in them. Her job was to open the boxes, check the contents and then mail them off to foreign addresses.
But somethingwas off.
The boxeswere plain, even though they included brand-name products. The name on the labels was never Newton’s. When she asked questions, her new employer stopped responding. In June, she reported Heies to the Better Business Bureau.
It turned out that Newton had become what is known in security circles as a money mule, an accomplice who, either knowingly or unknowingly, helps international criminal rings move their ill-gotten gains.
InNewton’s case, swindlers appeared to be buying products in the United States with stolen money and then mailing them — using unwitting intermediaries like her to disguise their involvement— tooverseas locations where the goods could be resold for cash.
“They really caught me at the perfect time,” said Newton, 24, who was living with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama. “I was just one of those desperate people looking for a job.”
Since the pandemic’s onset in March, thenumberof criminal schemes relyingon money mules has spiked, just when many people have lost their jobs and are vulnerable to exploitation.
The volume of schemes has been turbocharged partly by criminals going after enticing pots of money from the U.S. government — specifically, the benefit programs that were set up to help people and businesses hurt by the pandemicinduced economic downturn, authorities said.
In total, online human resources schemes where criminals pose as potential employers have soared 295% from a year ago, while schemes used for money laundering have skyrocketed by 609%, according to security firm ZeroFox.
Many people who perpetrate these frauds are based overseas, authorities said, so they need to move the money to their home country. Banks and authorities have made it harder to launder money through traditional financial channels in recent years.
Alma Sardas, 21, had been furloughed from her job at a hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, this springwhenshe sawa listingon jobs site ZipRecruiter advertising a workfrom-homeposition as a “virtual assistant” to a businessman inHongKong.
Sardas sat through a formal interview and spoke with a man who called himself Hermann Ziegler, who said he would be
her boss. Once shewas hired, shewas sent a check for $4,590 to deposit into her bank account. She was told to use some of the money for her expenses and to send the rest from her account to her new employer’s vendors.
Sardas became skeptical about why the moneywould need to go through her bank account and called local police. They explained that she had almost been caught in a classic money-laundering scheme.
“You make yourself so sincere and these people just take advantage of it,” she said, adding that she had shredded the check and reported the incident to ZipRecruiter, and the postingwas removed.