How I Earn £14,246 A Week

At least once a week I read something that makes me give up on humanity. While most of us (at least those reading this site) are decent folk wanting nothing more than to make an honest living and give our children a great start in life, there are scumbags who contrive sinister plots from their grubby bedsits to extract that hard-earned cash from our bank accounts. Sadly, for all its goodness, the Internet makes criminals’ lives a lot easier.

A new and emerging fraud scam has been exposed by ITV1’s ‘Tonight programme’ (on television Monday 27th October). The program confronts the true face of criminals involved in deception and theft through human ‘mules’, an endearing term used for people who unwittingly become duped into helping transfer illegal money, now has a less sophisticated but equally problematic spin-off: the ‘parcel mule’. Instead of transferring money, honest yet vulnerable people are being duped into handling goods obtained fraudulently, forwarding items on to criminals in other countries.

People may know what a drugs mule is and a parcel mule is essentially the same thing. Parcel mules have been around for ages and with Internet forums and community and part-time job sites, the scheme has emerged anew. How it work: 1) Job offer is posted; 2) Job offer states you receive parcels from the warehouse for onward transfer; 3) You receive a box to a PO Box address that you create; 4) You repost the box to a new address; 5) You are paid by wire or even Paypal for each successful receipt.

Such job postings are always parcel/money mule scams. Perhaps you will get paid, perhaps you won’t. However, the scam is that parcels can be sent through the post and money can be exchanged, thus laundering the cash. Parcel mules tend to be recruited once and may even be paid, but often they are not, which means that one person has laundered one item and may have unwittingly sent one consignment of stolen goods/drugs in the post. Transfers are often seen coming from many different people and parcel mules are many different people, which creates a problem for officers trying to identify where the next one will come from as moving something once is easy. Parcel mules rely on a vast turnover of ‘staff’ to avoid detection by intelligence teams.

For criminals using parcel mules there is far less risk of being caught by using someone else to handle goods that have been obtained illegally using fraudulent credit cards. Mules are often recruited through fake ‘job’ advertisements as well as through other methods such as spoof Web sites and even dating sites. Let’s put this into perspective. Last month (September 2008), APACS, the UK payments association, revealed the extent of the problem in the UK as data showed 873 detected fake ‘job’ adverts for parcel mules in the first half of 2008, up 345% over the last three years, and 33% on last year.

However, despite the increase in attempted fraud, the fact remains that it is still safe for consumers to buy online. This is due to the diligent attitude by retailers who see card fraud as a threat to their businesses. With the financial climate as it is, retailers face an uncertain sales period during the run up to Christmas; the last thing they need is yet another scam that rips off more of their revenue through deception. Criminals may think they are invisible, but actually UK retailers have become far savvier to techniques such as parcel mules and are using shared data schemes more extensively to prevent theft.

Although fraudsters will do their best to target UK retailers during the run up to Christmas, the fact that retailers are increasingly sharing data about criminal activity has made it even more difficult for thieves to succeed. So far this year, a crack squad of cyber enforcement folk have detected and prevented £83,117,390.52 fraud. This figure is expected to increase significantly during the lead up to Christmas. Thankfully, there’s shared databases containing clearly fraudulent and highly suspicious data, including listings of bad or questionable details such as e-mail addresses, delivery addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and card numbers.

Shared databases are not restricted to retailers as banks can also integrate their systems with services of this type. When fraud is detected a data feed is sent to the respective bank informing them that their cardholder has had details compromised. They can then act to re-issue the account number and possibly block the card. In the same way the banking community succeeded with Chip and PIN, this is another major way to protect retailers from card not present fraud.

Most tech-savvy people will be aware of such scams, but there are those who aren’t. It’s these people, especially those caught in the middle of a credit crunch with mounting debts, who I fear might consider one of these 'get rich' quick schemes. Let me leave you with a few words of wisdom:

- No legitimate company will use bank accounts of private individuals for processing payments from its customers. No legitimate business will pay 5% and more for international money transfers (for example, £250 out of £5000), when banks provide such services for only £30-50 per transaction and businesses and individuals can set up their own bank accounts in other countries if needed.

- No legitimate company uses private individuals to receive parcels and remail them.

- Any job offer that involves any of the above activities is a fraud!

Keep the day jobs people! And if something sounds too good to be true, then it is...