Scammers Taking Advantage Of Stay-At-Home Moms

You might be surprised by what the Better Business Bureau says was the biggest scam last year. The BBB put out a list of the biggest scams of 2018. Stephanie Garland with the BBB office in Springfield says a lot of those victims were stay at home moms.

Employment scams where people go ahead and they’re looking for jobs to work online and make tons of money while being able to stay at home and take care of the kids, that’s where people are finding out that they’re losing a lot of money, and that is actually the most popular approach that scammers are taking right now.

When it comes to who scammers victimize, they don’t discriminate. Employment scams were the riskiest for not only men and women, but the riskiest for military families, veterans, students. Scammers often take the time to prepare elaborate setups. They conduct in-depth interviews via Google Hangouts and other technologies, provide employment forms, and ask scam targets to perform job duties before the scam is discovered. These efforts appear to pay off, as evidenced by the higher median dollar loss. What makes these scams particularly risky is the fact that they made up 9.1 percent of all scams reported to BBB Scam Tracker in 2018. Employment scams target a large number of people and they tend to result in significant monetary loss.

The following excerpt is from a scam report submitted to BBB Scam Tracker in 2018:

I was looking for work online and was contacted by this person telling me that they reviewed my resume and were interested in setting up an online interview with me for an administrative assistant position. The person stated that it would be a home-based position starting at $20 an hour for two weeks of training, and after the training was done, they would pay $30 an hour. This scammer told me that they [would] be sending me all the materials and their software so I [could] begin the training process. They sent a cashier’s check for $3,911.35, which I needed to deposit and then wire transfer the funds to their vendor so they [could] send me the materials needed… The person told me that I had to buy 37 iTunes cards [worth] $100 each with that money so they [could] upload the software to the cards and then I [could] download the software onto my computer… My bank ended up returning the check because it turned out to be fraudulent and my account was over-drafted by $4,000 because of the overdraft fees. —Connecticut consumer, age 35–44

BBB’s list of Riskiest Scams of 2018:

Employment (Median loss: $1,204)
Online purchases (Median loss: $75)
Fake checks/money orders (Median loss: $1,500)
Home improvement (Median loss: $1,745)
Advance fee loans (Median loss: $675)
Romance (Median loss: $2,500)
Tech support (Median loss: $403)
Investment (Median loss: $1,965)
Travel/vacation (Median loss: $1,875)
Government grant (Median loss: $600)

Garland says while people are losing less money to scams, they are falling for more scams.