What kind of scam is this?

[helene_t]

A friend wanted to earn some easy money so she signed up with some obscure company that only communicated via WhatsApp (both for recruitment and for training). Their WhatsApp agents (at least some of them) are obviously not robots.

 

The company's own website was listed as fraudulent and the one my friend had to use for the actual work was uk-sonypictures.com which is not linked by Sony and was only 9 days old at the time my friend started. It is also suspiciously similar to the genuine page uk.sonypictures.com.

 

The company pay out in bitcoins only. When my friend had earned the equivalent of 83 USD, she was asked to transfer 17 USD as there was a balance requirement of 100 USD before she could proceed to the next task and earn more money, but she was told she could withdraw all the 100 USD immediately as soon as she had transfered the 17 USD.

 

The "work" consisted of buying Sony movie tickets for an average price of -0.17 USD (i.e. negative price). There is no evidence that the movie tickets and the USD 0.17 exist anywhere other than in the imagination of the user.

 

This is a fairly obvious scam but I wonder how they are making money. The amount of time they spend on chatting to my friend (who eventually decided not to pay the USD 17) probably costs more than USD17.

 

If their business model is not based on the USD 17 it is bit strange that they ask for that money at all as it will discourage many victims, but maybe it works through cognitive disonance (once you have paid USD 17 you will become positively biased in favour or trusting them)?

[pilowsky]

There's a whole genre of youtubers that bait scammers.

They (the scammers) are found in poor countries that have little interest in policing activity that involves cooling the wallets of people in wealthy (UK/europe/USA/Australia etc).

According to the ACCC ~$2,000,000,000 was lost to scams in Australia last year.

 

What they don't mention is that Australians lose ~$30,000,000,000 to legal gambling outlets each year.

 

There's an even darker side where gangs enslave people and force them to ensnare victims.

[Gilithin]

There are a few possible schemes that this can lead to but I suspect it might be an elaborate start to a simple fake cheque scam. What I suspect would happen is that fake company would overpay, say $1000 instead of $100, in a form that cannot be cashed immediately, traditionally a cheque. They then ask the victim to pay back the overpayment and naturally the cheque will later bounce. Other possibilities involve issues with the money transfer that need to be lifted by paying some fee, or by obtaining the bank details that can then be used in a follow-up scam.

[kenberg]

The purpose of a scam is to scam people. Beyond that, it is hard to tell just what their routine is.

 

However: Possibly nothing that has been done so far is illegal. I believe that scams sometimes start slow. The first task is to find a sucker. "Here, do this and you will make lots of money" or "You have won a jackpot" or something. Then the name is put on a list and they come at the sucker from a different angle. I would advise your friend to be seriously skeptical of anything that appears on her computer for quite a while. But then I think that is good advice for all of us. There is no free lunch.

[LBengtsson]

It's a slow burn scan, similar to fraudsters who scam people on online dating sites. The scammer builds up a level of trust between the client and scammer by asking the client to do certain things, and the scammer does other things that build a level of trust for the client. A two way dialogue is started.

 

The big hit comes later, maybe days or weeks, or even months down the line. Anyone who is not gullible would have disappeared off the radar quick. It is similar to gambling, and the gambler who cannot stop putting bets on, because that is what they hope to find: someone with a addictive personality who is not quick on the uptake.

 

I cannot work out in total how this scam is operating - I admit - other than starting the dialogue, but that is all the scammer needs. It is no different to sales methods employed by car salesmen, who once they get a client interested, start to negotiate the price, give away add-ons such as a free warranty, gasoline, etc. The bigger picture is the sale of the already overpriced car whatever it takes, the big hit.

[kenberg]

I mentioned this to my wife Becky and she also compared it with gambling, as LBengtsson does above. It is not possible for a rational person to think that playing slot machines in a Las Vegas casino is a good way to build up his band account. Still, people do it.

 

How can a person make some money? My worst experience, although not a scam, not exactly, was when I was 17, the summer between high school and college. I became a door-to-door salesman. I knocked on doors and explained to the women who came to the door why they should buy the various skin creams and other stuff that I was selling. Of course I had no idea whatsoever of what the stuff was or why anyone would want it. This job did not last long. I then got a job delivering furniture. Clear cut. People bought furniture, I delivered the furniture, and I got paid for delivering the furniture. Buying movie tickets for a negative price??? Someone has to explain who is paying for this and why they would do so before anyone should even consider such a job. What's the catch? Who knows? But there is one.

 

Becky also noted that if you send the 17 bucks you presumably send it electronically. Uh oh.

[johnu]

How do you "buy" something that has a negative price? Does the victim have to use their own credit/debit card to receive the credit? If so, that's an immediate and serious problem.

 

Fortunately I don't have to try to make extra money because a Prince from Nigeria is sending me $5 million dollars for helping him "rescue" his fortune from a hostile government.

[pilowsky]

How do you "buy" something that has a negative price? Does the victim have to use their own credit/debit card to receive the credit? If so, that's an immediate and serious problem.

 

Fortunately I don't have to try to make extra money because a Prince from Nigeria is sending me $5 million dollars for helping him "rescue" his fortune from a hostile government.

 

True, and I wish you'd hurry up and make the payment so I can get my fortune back.

[barmar]

A good place to ask questions like this is money.stackexchange.com. The experts there are familiar with the details of all the scams and can tell you exactly how it works.

 

In general, whenever someone says we'll pay you X but you need to send us Y, the X will turn out to be fraudulent. Either the bank will require you to return the X, or they'll eat it themselves (they probably have insurance for this, so the insurance company eats it). Either way, the scammer gets Y. They're probably in a jurisdiction that your law enforcement can't reach, so they're safe from prosecution.