Payment-Processing Scam

You are offered a job as US/Canada payment-processing rep for a foreign firm, after the phony company representative finds your resume on an Internet job site and interviews you over the phone.

This fake company's American customers will send their payments to you, you are told. These might be items purchased off eBay or the company's own website.

Your job is to forward the money to your employer overseas, keeping a small percentage for yourself as compensation. The payments might be deposits in a PayPal account (a free, secure way to make online payments), wire transfers or checks, and you are told to forward the money through a wire transfer service, such as Western Union.

The fake employer might explain that hiring an American payment-processing representative has legal or tax advantages... or that sending money to a domestic address is more convenient for the firm's customers.

The job goes smoothly for weeks or months -- until the police show up at your door because your fake employer's customers have never received their orders.

By using you to forward payments, the thief was able to supply a domestic address for payments, which increases buyers' trust.

You could be sued or even prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, assuming the police believe that you were an innocent pawn in the deception, but a civil lawsuit against you requires only that you failed to use "reasonable care."