We CAUGHT a Fake Job Scammer

[Music] today's scam was brought to us by our new friend t shea also known as twander on tick tock while she was applying for jobs online she came across a job offer that seemed suspicious to say the least t'shea proceeded to string along this scammer in a series of videos on tiktok before passing it along to us for further investigation but first meet tisha hi so my name is t-shay and i'm also known as twanderontektalk and someone tried to scam me i was looking for online jobs because i'm currently a college student one of the places that i was applying to was on craigslist and one person got back to me my job duties would basically be as a virtual office assistant for a ceo of an insurance company i was very cautious and started making a series on tick tock called scamming a scammer dr oz as well as ashton and art reached out to me stating that you know they could get more information about the scammer and it's just been a really crazy ride this is a pretty elaborate scam with a lot of steps and we're going to expose each one in explicit detail starting with the craigslist job posting let's apply for the job and see if we can infiltrate this web of lies brother are you ready i'm ready let's do it this is a fake check scam also referred to as an online job scam it starts with a seemingly innocuous job ad online in this case craigslist it's posted by someone calling herself mariah torra hiring personnel for nvil insurance group in tennessee seeking a home-based personal assistant for the head of hr we want to see exactly what steps mariah takes throughout the scam and no better way to do that than to apply for the job ourselves now since she'll probably ask me for a resume i can use this opportunity to get her to click an ip grabber tracking link so that we can find out where she's actually located let's get started okay i am going to make a new link mariah is asking for my resume i'm going to have the link forward to linkedin and i'm going to tell her that i have my resume on linkedin so she won't be alerted when she ends up on linkedin [Music] the thing is she doesn't really need my resume for this scam it's all just part of the ruse so she may not click this although if she is gonna use information from the resume against me like my contact information or whatever my his job history at all she'll have to click it hey she clicked it she clicked it got her she's in lagos nigeria uh wow here's a legit google forms link mhm [Music] our voicemail system by connecting with her on google hangouts it allows us to communicate with mariah in a much more instant fashion and gives us the ability to do direct video calls to her but we first have to get her to accept the invite oh our voicemail system hi mariah uh this is chase um i'm sorry to keep calling you but i i like i told you i don't have unlimited text messaging i just sent you a google hangout invite and we can chat there uh thank you so much for your reply and for getting back to me i'm really excited about this opportunity this is chase chapman i'll talk to you soon bye-bye so right from the get-go she's being pretty stubborn about communicating with me in any other fashion other than text message so i knew from the start that this scam bait would not be easy or quick scammers like to move fast but more importantly they like not to get caught so i followed her request of filling out the questionnaire that she had set up on google forms and then waited for her to get back to me and believe it or not i got the job quite quickly i might add no background check no identification no contract nothing but as you'd expect she already has a task for me to complete she explains to me that she'll be sending me a cashier's check which will include my initial salary plus extra funds added on top of it for me to help purchase laboratory equipment from one of her suppliers how convenient we're gonna try calling mariah she's actively texting you right now as of now the check is late i guess i don't know if that's a tactic of hers or if it really is just running late in the mail but she said it'll be here in the next four days she said okay who do you bank with it's a bank of america okay she said okay what is your daily limit and is your account attached to cash app why would an employer ask me that daily limit i just played dumb do you mean like for debit and she said i mean do you have cash up what is your withdrawer limit per day i said let me check she said okay we're gonna call the text now subscriber you are trying to reach is not available another scammer using text now we've said this a million times convenient is that texted back saw your missed call but i'm attending to something of course she's busy yes but i need to explain it you know the limit it's complicated oh man yeah just like answer yeah answer my call for two minutes but she has time to check my bank limit right now right yeah but she can't take my phone call for two minutes oh yeah of course yeah she has a solution okay email me if you find it difficult to text i'll just talk to you on the phone when you're available yep oh really difficult oh it's really dude she's mocking me or is she not mocking me what's going on i'll pick up the phone all right send me the rube team and account number the routing and account number already the text now subscriber i'm busy i'm confused we'll talk to you later maybe we're on the hook a little bit maybe don't reply for a few hours make her itchy and i need that money it took her a couple of weeks but she did finally get me a tracking number and eventually the check was delivered to my office mailbox [Music] [Music] okay it's a new day this finally showed up mariah our scammer mariah torra has sent me my first payment for my assistant job apparently i'm allergic to [ __ ] sent to a mr chase chapman at my office address sent from kim service incorporated paul morrison in bloomfield new jersey zero seven zero zero three and this was paid for a priority mail two day envelope looks like it was printed at someone's house because it's not even on like a it's just like it's really blurry i'm gonna take a picture of this i don't think she ever told me how much money i was gonna be getting i have been checking my files and what i would want you to do for me this week is to run some errands to one of our suppliers whom we just purchased some laboratory equipment from payments are to be made to them as soon as possible i would send you a certified cashiers check which will be sent over to you from one of our account officers first thing tomorrow morning and i will let you know how to get to my supplier once you receive the funds oftentimes they'll tell you you're going to get a certain amount and then they'll overpay you and they'll tell you that that the difference needs to be sent to somebody and then of course the check is fake to begin with so they're actually profiting off of you uh with their scam however here she never actually said how much i'm getting paid so i am assuming she's just expecting me to take this money deposit it and then uh send a payment somewhere and then she texted me yesterday hello usps says the package has been delivered kindly deposited the check in your account directly through your bank mobile app or alternatively through atm i will give you cash allocation procedure and further instructions on what to do once the funds are made available in your account send me a picture of the deposit slip after you must have deposited it so i can authorize the payment they don't want you to go into the bank they want you to deposit it via atm or on your phone a teller at a bank is gonna probably be able to spot it right away that it's not real so they want you to deposit it via atm or mobile app because the available balance will be reflected right like if it's going to bounce it's not going to bounce immediately so you're going to deposit into your bank it'll probably show that the deposit is pending and then they will have taken money from you but then you haven't gotten anything so i'm gonna open this right now on camera this is exactly how it showed up in our mailbox okay it's just an envelope with a check there's no note there's nothing else and here it is this is what came in the mail supposedly a cashier's check from south central bank for three thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars and fifty cents the remitter mary ann nichols don't know who that is must be their accounting person to verify authenticity see reverse side for description of the 13 security features so they have just printed this on a piece of paper it's a thick piece of paper it feels like a check i mean i'm no bank teller but this feels somewhat legit i'm sure if i went through these docu-guard steps it would be easy to tell that this isn't real i don't really see any water marks there's a heat sensitive shield fades with heat or touch let me touch it that actually works i'm gonna record this just so you can see heat sensitive shield fades with heat or touch i don't know if the uh lighting on the camera is gonna do this justice here but if i just cover this with my thumb for a few seconds and then uncover it it is fading a little bit enough that if you didn't know what you were talking about this could probably convince you that this is real i wonder if this is even a real bank south centralbank.com [Music] well it's an actual website it is a secure connection find a branch okay so it seems to be a local bank in kentucky so why is this being sent from bloomfield new jersey mariah wants me to deposit this and then immediately transfer the money now this is a really interesting one because there's a very thin window of opportunity here i'm gonna tell her that i deposited this into an atm she was asking me for a deposit slip so i'm going to make a fake deposit slip and the clock is kind of ticking as far as she's concerned because she knows that me is the victim when i learn that this check is bounced i'm not going to give her any money right her scam stops in its tracks so she has the time between me depositing this with a pending available balance to the time that it bounces for her to actually scam me successfully which actually works to our benefit because that urgency on her end might make her more desperate to do what we want on our end so i'm gonna make a fake deposit slip then i'm gonna play on the urgency of the situation to see if i can get her on the phone and better yet on video chat so let's get to work [Music] that's our deposit slip a little bit of a blur still can see that it was the right number but you can't make out any information otherwise and it doesn't look too tampered with i don't imagine she'll be looking at it very long again i don't think she's using this to uh garner information it's more just about knowing when the scam trigger is is ready to go now as i mentioned they always want you to deposit the check via an atm or a mobile deposit in order to avoid you from going into the bank and actually showing the check to a teller now even though sometimes these checks can seem convincing we've done this enough times to know that this is fake however art and i have previously investigated these fake check scams before and have even gone into the field to get a professional opinion can i talk to the manager for real quick [Music] we have a youtube channel that we're busting scammers so basically what they do uh they send you 500 small and they say like oh my god we sent you a little bit more send us back and we'll deposit to your account we're familiar with that did you guys head before like that yeah i've had multiple customers come in with that they're the same how can you tell the check is uh bound so like what well i can tell by looking at it that it's just the characteristics the way it looks it looks fake okay it doesn't look real uh i can guarantee if i run it through the system it's gonna tell us it's fake so if you cache this right now against your account and we allow you to cash it and we give you this money here um by the next couple days the item would bounce and then we'll go into your account and take that money out and if you don't have this money available your account will become overdrawn what would you do in that situation if you got spam like this with this fake check that they are sending you would you still be only banking that money yeah because you're putting the check at your own risk into your account without even i don't even know that they you know like the company gave me that that is correct so now the clock starts as far as she's concerned i've already deposited the check into an atm and it didn't take her long to jump to the next step of the scam by asking me if i had cash app or zell i continued to play dumb at the demand that she talked to me on the phone considering her limited time window she obliged hello mariah i'm good how are you it's nice to talk to you [Music] i didn't understand a single syllable of what you just said you said you needed me to put money into cash app i'm just a little confused as to as to how this works okay um listen i don't have a lot of text messages on my phone i sent you an invite on google hangout so we can text there can you accept it so we can talk better right now just do it on your phone uh it's a it's just on your gmail i sent it to your mariah torah email here just it's just an invite i can work on the cash app once i see you on uh once we connect on google hangouts um because i just i'm just a little scared about everything i just want to make sure it's all good [Music] okay i'm just having a really hard time understanding you so yeah if you could find me on google hangouts please i already sent you an invite okay do it do it right now please i'm waiting yeah just go into your gmail right now it's right there on your phone i'm not hearing any of your replies so i'm just going to repeat myself okay this is like the charlie brown situation uh yeah please find the google hangout invite so we can chat there please dude it's either an actual woman or a guy using a voice changer i'm gonna do my best to find out which one it's not hard to imagine that these scammers spend a lot of time trying to avoid being caught tracked or linked to any permanent phone number or email address throughout this process mariah has already changed phone numbers on me once with an excuse of course and now she's asking for the google hangout invite to be resent to an alternate email address going along with her excuses i resent the invite and she accepted it [Music] nice [Music] [Music] hi how are you okay in here can you hear me yeah but i can't see anything um i told you i don't know what's happening it's not it's not picking up i i just wanted to meet you and say hi i'm i'm really excited to work for you it's really good to see you too uh i was concerned about what when you told me about your salary you had sent me a check for i think it was 3 800 or something but i thought that was my my salary but i have to i have to give some of it back i'm just a little confused i know i know i know i stood you up um i'll wait you know your check but uh it's because uh we we had so many things to do and so many um businesses to attend to so i had to add to uh depend about to bend you and working for oh so how much am i gonna get 600 for now and uh i'll be paying you subsequently um a time goes on oh where where do you where where do you live exactly i'm basically i'm basically working in tennessee right now i'm i'm starting a new business with a friend and that's the paperwork i was telling you about we're starting a new business uh you know about bitcoin that's one of the reasons why i need all things to be in place because we need equipment for uh for the new office because we're standing hard work so we have basically a lot of things we're standing up so that's why i was i was trying to tell you about that i don't know can i chat you up i have some things to take care of now i'm really busy right now i just need to go back to making the paperwork's work it's good to meet you i'm sure you're gonna meet me son okay yeah it's wonderful to meet you too uh i'll tell you what as soon as you're able to uh say hi to me then i will be able to i'll send you that that money that that's just all i want to do just to feel more comfortable because i know there's a lot of weird stuff out there so i'll try to see how that works but i really need you to get on it and the tax as soon as possible you asked me to call you i did that he told me to come home here i just i know i know i know how you want to be preventable at all and i like your walk already you're being patient with me so well can you see can you see me it's a bit it's a bit moving around i could see your hand moving i could see your head you could see me am i am i cute is that not the fakest voice you've ever heard in your life hello sorry about it i could see your hand moving am i cute yeah you you are you are you such a you're such a funny one i'm i'm a little bit of a jokester you know i like to mess with people if you know what i mean i i can do your hands moving out yo i can see you moving out you have your glasses on right yeah yeah i don't have much time to talk right now but i'll be talking to you i'll be talking to you thank you for talking to me but i i need to see you that's all that's all i ask so if you can't do it then i then i'll have to move on ah i don't know but i'll just try to see what i can do or send you a video something saying harper but i needed to work hard i i have things to do i got things to do too believe me i want to be a good employee but this is my one requirement that's all i ask this is my costume that's all i'm going to say because i'm really stressed right now i'm trying to tell you this gonna cost me what does that mean what are you gonna punish me with a ruler what does that mean it can cost me what's going on because you like if you lose this job if you lose this job uh because i have some things i need to settle trying to walk towards making it go well i can find another job i mean it's this is you know i mean i'll do what i have to do but i also need to protect myself so oh i'll try i'll try i'll try that i'll get back to you okay thank you thanks mariah bye-bye bye is that not the fakest stupidest voice you've ever heard in your life it was so distorted on the original audio call that i couldn't tell if it was like a voice changer or just like a a pretend voice but it was much clearer here and that sounds a lot different than the person on the original audio call so my guess is that probably on their phone number maybe they have like a voice changer or something through the text now app or they have something configured because on this google hangouts sounded a lot different to me the next morning i not only received several texts from mariah but a very strongly worded email explaining her dissatisfaction with my performance as her assistant according to her she hired me to reduce her workload but all i'm doing is contributing to it which is cool she continued by explaining that i needed to deduct six hundred dollars from the check for my salary and then send the remaining thirty two hundred dollars to a foster home i thought it was for lab equipment her frustration is rising and she knows she's running out of time so i thought i'd raise the stakes on my end as well i responded as chase emphasizing how upset i was that she yelled at me and made it very clear that i'm crying uncontrollably she took the bait and called me immediately now keep in mind i can't always plan when scammers are going to be active or responsive so as this was still early on a saturday morning and i hadn't gotten out of bed yet we're working with only a pov shot from my pillow [Music] mariah what happened you yelled at me i don't mean okay you're not going to fire me right okay okay i'm sorry i'll be okay [Music] you promise i can't hear you oh my god that is a dude yeah right 100 that's what i thought that's what i thought oh we just hung up now don't let her sentiment fool you she went right back to being snarky and frustrated via text message due to her stubborn refusal to fix her camera as she promised i instead asked her to film a video of herself and send it to me just to see what she would do tensions continued to rise but greeting me on my phone a few hours later was this video hey chain how are you doing i just got my camera fixed i'm a very busy person just took out my visa time to make this video for you sorry i made you cry it is because i was so worried about the phone can you please go ahead and complete the task because we have a lot of work to do next week thank you bye likely a different person from the one i spoke to before but still fascinating nonetheless to see the lengths that these scammers will go to to deceive people and potentially how many people around them are helping to make this happen sadly mariah never did fix her phone to video chat me but i continued to waste her time the entire rest of the week several texts many calls and eventually hinting at the fact that i may not be who i said i was this only infuriated her more and brought out a new side of mariah that we had not seen yet now the number of texts are exhaustive but here's a little taste [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] fish at this point i think mariah has realized that i'm not going to be as stellar of an employee as she may have hoped but in all seriousness this is a very common type of scam that's going on especially with so many things happening remotely right now if you are offered employment online and it seems a bit fishy here are the things you want to look out for rushed hiring if somebody is ready to hire you without experience without a job training oh just got the job just like that like you're hired right on spot no real interviews no training nothing verification of your information big red flag overpayment now this is a big one they not only gonna send you a fake check they're also gonna send you check that it's a the balance it's much higher sometimes they're they overpay you or for whatever they say is going to be your first week's salary and there could be many reasons for this sometimes they'll say it was on accident or sometimes they'll say oh uh we gave you extra so you can go and get the training materials or you have to regis register for some reason money for extra week for you on a house at the end of the day they want you to send them the difference via usually an online payment source like cash app or venmo they want to get that difference from you now the check is fake it's going to bounce at the bank but before that happens they convince you that you owe them money by the time the check is bounced they're long gone with the money that you actually gave them another thing to keep in mind here is if you do get a check from something that seems fishy or from an unknown sender or something that you're unsure about take the check into the bank and ask a teller don't deposit it with an atm or with a mobile app because even if the check is fake you might still get a pending balance uh of part of that check before it actually bounces which would then enable you to send them the money that they're asking you for so take it to a teller ask them make sure it's real think go to the teller go to the cashier ask questions don't ever ever be afraid to ask questions and finally lack of communication and this really goes for all types of scams but especially these when it's potentially your employer if they don't want to call you on the phone i don't want to meet you facetime you or meet you face to face i mean that's a little weird so what meeting in person oh wow if they're go higher they usually like to communicate strictly via text or whatsapp or email email um so if they're avoiding any direct communication beyond that uh another really big red flag stay informed stay safe and make sure you subscribe to your favorite scam fighting duo over at trilogy media my name is ashton my name is art and we'll see you next time

Channel: Trilogy Media

Views: 243,169

Keywords: trilogy media, trilogymedia, scambait, scambaiter, robocalls, scambaiters, job scam, online scam, employment scam, job search scam, nigerian scam

Id: IJKUA2Q1heU

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021