Plan a Scam with Spam

This post was written by Michael on July 26, 2008
Posted Under: Entrepreneurial

We all suffer in varying degrees because of of it. It’s all over the ‘Net, it’s in everyone’s In Box, it’s as reliable as the sunrise. It is spam.
One email I received this morning claimed to have my contact details from an on-line jobs database and were offering me a job. It sounded perfectly legitimate, it was a real company which sold ceramic tiles. They claimed that their overseas sales volume was expanding rapidly and they needed a Sales Manager to handle the work. A reasonable salary was offered and a commission based on sales. I had to have a bank account into which the proceeds from overseas sales would be deposited and I was to forward those funds on to the Head Office, minus my commissions.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Too good in fact. It turns out that this ‘opportunity’ is a way to launder money and they need a ‘money mule’ whose bank account they can use and who will forward the money on to a third account.
It’s illegal, of course and getting involved in it probably would result in a lengthy and messy legal tangle while trying to prove your innocence.
What rang the warning bell for me was that I have never submitted my name to any employment web site. I get lots of submissions every day to the Every Franchise directory that are little more that poorly-disguised scams. It’s bothersome to read through the claims of instant wealth, all of which sound pretty much the same. Probably only one in ten submissions are legitimate business opportunities or franchises and here-in lies, I suppose, the main advantage of directories such as these. The filtering has been done, the scams tossed out, the links checked and the businesses validated.

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