Champagne buckets, Ski-Doo part of reshipping scam
Early in the pandemic, Krystelle Goodman lost her job as a sales consultant at Zales Jewelers in the Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, Michigan.
School closures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 meant her teen daughter ended up learning remotely at home, like other Detroit students. And Goodman decided to try to find a job that allowed her to keep tabs on her daughter and offer help when needed by working from home.
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 reshipping 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 on Detroit’s west side.
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.
“Half of the stuff they sent was pretty heavy,” Goodman said. Sometimes, her boyfriend would help her handle it.
Some boxes had $50 ice buckets for champagne. Some had parts for Ski-Doo snowmobiles. One involved a snowmobile lift, which she later priced online for around $500.
Many of the items went to an address in Blaine, Minnesota, a suburb north of the Twin Cities.
One time, she said, one FedEx ship center on Ford Road in Dearborn wouldn’t accept a package and she had to email the company to find out what to do next.
They told her to just try another store. She headed to the Livonia store and the box was shipped from there.
Things seemed to be going OK. 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. She was out what would have been $1,100 for the packages and more than $400 in expenses.
After that month, the emails slowed down and she wasn’t receiving any more packages. And she never, ever got any money.
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. Goodman wasn’t suspicious until the company went silent and didn’t send her any money.
Like many hard hit by job cuts, though, Goodman said she desperately wanted a job. She had just bought a new car a month or so before the pandemic hit in 2020, got behind on her bills and ultimately filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the spring of 2021.
“It’s unfortunate and I’m just trying to find a legitimate opportunity now to be able to work and get myself back on my feet.”
Consumer watchdogs are warning of an uptick in jobs scams, such as reshipping scams, as many unemployed workers try to find jobs where they can work at home during the pandemic.
Across Michigan, the Better Business Bureau has received 10 reports of reshipping employment scams in the past six months.
“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.
Another big red flag: The pay that’s promised to work from home is often far more than $15 or $20 an hour.
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.”
The FBI and others warn that consumers who take on these reshipping jobs are getting caught up in fraud rings that launder merchandise or money.
The crime rings can use stolen credit card numbers, forged credit cards or counterfeit money orders to buy expensive goods or equipment online. To get their cash, though, the crooks are going to need to resell those goods on the black market.
The FBI warns that instead of having the items shipped to the billing address, the fraudster sends them to what’s called a “reshipper.”