'Easy money' pitch is scam bait, police warn

'Work at home' involves reshipping of goods that were bought with stolen credit cards

You've seen the advertisements: Earn big bucks working at home! No experience necessary! No selling!

If you bite, you might find yourself at the center of an international scheme to defraud online retailers and ship the ill-gotten goods overseas.

The ads, in classified sections or on employment Web sites, draw in unsuspecting people nationwide.

They are paid initially but soon find that they themselves have been scammed, either receiving nothing or checks that turn out to be counterfeit.

Columbus police warned yesterday that the scam is showing up in central Ohio.

It has been around for years but seems to be picking up as the economy continues to sour, said detective Ronald Reese with the Division of Police Fraud and Forgery Unit.

Reese described the scheme this way: The scammer uses stolen credit-card numbers to buy merchandise online and have it sent to a reshipper. The reshipper relabels the packages with prepaid, online shipping labels provided by the scammer and reships the merchandise to a foreign country.

By the time the retailer realizes that the credit-card number is bogus, the merchandise is out of the country. And the retailer doesn't catch on right away because his merchandise is being sent to numerous reshippers, rather than one location.

Most of the scam's organizers are from Canada, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, Reese said. The merchandise can be anything -- diamonds, computers, clothing.

In one recent Columbus case, he said, a Xenia company sent remote-controlled race cars to a Downtown apartment. The company contacted Columbus police after becoming suspicious because the credit card used to buy the toys belonged to a woman in Illinois.

Police determined that the credit-card number had been stolen, confronted the man in the apartment and learned that he was a reshipper. The case is still being investigated.

"We intercepted computers from a student on campus doing it, and cameras from another residence," Reese said. "It's just whomever they can get to ship it to and reship it. They target everyone and anyone trying to make a fast buck."

Not all reshippers are victims, he said. If police can prove that the reshippers knew about the scam, they can charge them with fraud and receiving stolen property.

Scammers also find reshippers through on-line dating sites and social-networking sites, said Michael Mara, risk program manager for the nonprofit Merchant Risk Council in Seattle.

"They're the most desperate and lonely, but also people who are desperate financially."

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