With U.S. unemployment high and rising, more people are streaming onto the Web in search
When Claude Vera responded to the customer-service job opening he saw on the online-classified site Geebo.com back in February, it seemed like one of a hundred small acts that might get him back to work. Most of his e-mail messages to prospective employers were going unanswered, so he was relieved when Penguin Express replied the very next day with a work-from-home job.
To help him get a home office started, Penguin sent him money orders so he could buy, via money wire, the requisite laptop and other equipment from several different people. Mr. Vera, of Jamaica, New York, deposited nine U.S. Postal Service money orders into his Chase bank account and wired a total of $6,900 to the various vendors. But he never received a laptop or anything else, and the money orders turned out to be already cashed or counterfeit. The scam consumed Mr. Vera’s tax refund and put him in the red by $6,900 to Chase, which has sent his case to a collection agent.
“Looking back at the whole thing I was very, very naive, but I needed a job so bad,” he says. “I’m behind in everything. I’m behind in my rent. I’m behind in all the bills I’m responsible for. It has wiped me out financially.”
With unemployment high and rising, more people are streaming onto the Web in search of jobs — and running into costly scams. Like job seekers, criminals are after moneymaking opportunities online as well. And they are setting increasingly sophisticated traps to prey on the desperation of the jobless, whose guards are down amid eroding savings, swelling debt and calamities like foreclosure and bankruptcy.
Victims can ill afford another financial setback.
“If you are a con artist, having more people…