Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
Scammers fool millennials out of millions of dollars: Here's how
Fake checks, Google Hangouts and Alexa are used by scammers to rip off millennials and others. Victims include: The lonely and financially stressed.
www.usatoday.com
Stefanie Rinna, 26, initially was pretty happy to get a text from a prospective employer who said she spotted the young woman's information on the job site Indeed.com. So Rinna jumped on the chance in September to do an interview via Google Hangouts.
The interviewer for the food packaging company seemed to want to fill a real job.
"At first, she seemed pretty legit," said Rinna, a mother of three who lives in Taylor, Michigan. "She was pretty formal."
No, they never talked by phone. No, they didn't do a video chat. Just chatting by text via Google Hangouts.
But maybe, Rinna hoped, this could be a real job as an administrative assistant. The pay was great: $26 an hour during her training period and after that $29 an hour.
Then the company ended up sending a cashier's check via FedEx for around $1,099. She was to deposit the check in her bank and use the money to buy a fax machine, a copy machine and a MacBook Pro to work from home.
OK, but all that stuff would have cost her around $3,000, based on her estimates.
She began to wonder if the check was even real. She called the bank that supposedly issued the check out of the Washington, D.C., area. She discovered it was a fake check, thankfully before she deposited it.