In these tough economic times, many of us are looking for work. But don't let your quest for employment suck you into the innumerable "work at home" scams riddling the Internet. In particular, watch out for a new trick that targets PayPal users. We've had several reports lately that describe a similar scenario: An online ad seeks to hire people to use their own PayPal accounts to facilitate sales for customers who allegedly have no other way to transfer funds.

Here's a typical, but real, example reported to us in March. The victim answered a Monster.com job ad like the one in Figure 1, posted by a company called Insync Soft that claimed to be based in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Looking for people with experience using PayPal, the company promised to pay 10% and up on any transactions the person facilitated. (Monster.com has since removed the ad.)

In a follow up e-mail, Insync Soft representative William Lesoe claimed PayPal wasn't allowed in his country (it's not), so the company needed someone from the outside to act as a middleman to receive funds from customers buying software. But—and here's the catch—the job seeker (that is, the victim) had to set up and use his own PayPal account and to send Insync Soft payment and log-on information. And he had to use his own credit card and bank account to guarantee the PayPal account.

You can probably guess the rest of the story. The victim receives credit card payments from "customers" to the PayPal account, then sends the money out of the country by an untraceable Western Union cash transaction. As with the infamous Nigerian scams, the victim is supposed to keep a percentage of the money.

But there's no happy ending. Once the money has been withdrawn and sent, there are charge-backs from the credit card companies because the credit cards were stolen. PayPal returns the money to the credit card company and goes after the account holder for the money. The victim is left to cover the charge-backs out of his own pocket. The customers, of course, are bogus.

We spoke with a woman named Gloria in the account resolution department at PayPal to see what a victim can do. Not much, it turns out, because the victim agreed to be the primary company or person on the PayPal account. And PayPal doesn't allow its account holders to act as intermediaries for others.

Charge-backs usually occur when the credit card company contests a charge because of nonshipment, misrepresentation, or occasionally fraud. The credit card company asks PayPal for the money, who in turn asks the account owner. PayPal will go to the boards to defend its members against charge-backs, but only if there's a paper trail showing that products were shipped or services rendered. In this scam, since the victim is acting as a straw man and not actually shipping anything, PayPal won't fight the charge-backs. These are empty transactions, so the victim has no recourse.

Be wary of variations on this theme. We also received reports of companies called Ross Soft (owned by a Kevin Lesoe) and Eastern Exchange advertising on job boards. Both promised great rewards for PayPal work.

# posted by Medical Information : 5:03 AM