Job hunting seems to cost more in North Dakota as one woman found herself in a $9,000 scam by a company who is even registered with the Better Business Bureau.
Her story comes to you from KX News Brenda is looking for a job–sending her resume everywhere.
“I’m out there on Monster and Career Builders…” says Brenda Stockart-Wald Then, she got a bite. “Then this company; 1st national transportation. They contacted me by voicemail.”
“They’re registered with Better Business and they had a great rating.”
And so she started training. After 4 weeks, the company asked her to purchase and send 4 laptops to an address in Ukraine. To do this, they provided money for her to put on her Discover card. “They gave us the account number to put that onto our credit card in order to purchase these computers.”
But after the computers were shipped, the money disappeared. “Then we noticed the payment was returned. We tried stopping the shipments but it had already left Chicago to go across seas.” says Donnie Wald. So Brenda called her bank to verify the companies account “Then the bank at Wells Fargo told me no. Brenda this is not their account.” So now she is in the hole–almost nine thousand dollars. “There is really nothing we can do.”
According to Parrall Grossman, this scam is similar to others he has seen…just very elaborate.
“And this appears to be very sophisticated in that this entity was able to get an account set up at a bank which lent some air of legitimacy.” says Parrall Grossman, Director of Consumer Protection.
But he says there were red flags. “When somebody offers a very high salary initially, they are not located right here in the state of North Dakota, and they want you to send some amount of money, usually it would be a thousand dollars or more. That should be a strong warning of a possible scam.”
Brenda who has a degree in criminal justice did a lot of research before accepting the position. “I was legitimately learning things, and I even Googled stuff to make sure that the information that I was learning is correct” Says Brenda. “And I was excited about it until things turned sour and then it’s just devastating to know that there’s people in this world that can do that.”
Now she knows what to watch out for, and to be careful who to trust when looking for work.
Officials at Consumer protection remind us that there is no internet police and to be extremely careful when sharing important information. They say that scammers of this kind are extremely difficult to catch.
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Source: KX News
