Scam stories are often the hardest to tell, largely because the people who fall into these traps feel so humiliated and at the same time emotionally devastated for wasting their time, effort and money on something too good to be true.
I would like to believe that I live in an ideal world, where people are honest and act with respect towards others, but that is not only a lie, it is impossible. In times like these, when the economic crisis is overwhelming us and there are less and less conventional jobs, it seems that we can only be the prey or the hunter, a hare at the disposal of swindlers.
The Internet has given us freedoms that at other times in human history would never have been dreamed of, however behind this great tool hide terrifying and unscrupulous people with only one goal in life: to get rich with the money and effort of others.
Recently a friend told me with tears in her eyes how she was deceived by scammers pretending to be managers or talent recruiters offering very well paid jobs or tasks, showing as a facade a more or less structured web page so that people would feel that it is a high level structure.
As I am not a friend or part of the staff of that "company", I will say its name: 69onlinejobs, whose staff captured my friend as soon as she published her first offer of service in the portal Fiverr, a website with a much better reputation in online jobs than the aforementioned one.
No sooner had she published her first service offer (translation of digital documents from English to Spanish) than an army of bots sent her messages to contact them via Telegram because they would make her an offer that would be hard to refuse. Precisely one of the offers was that they would pay you $45 per page translated and digitized to .doc (Word) format of a file with 150 images of a book.
You will say, "there is a reason why Fiverr instructs its users not to establish contact with people outside the platform", obviously you are right, but it is also understandable that she felt pressured because she urgently needed to produce because behind every user of an employment platform there is a drama, someone who has not found a job for months, sick children or parents, hunger and despair, elements that hit very hard to those who suffer, especially here from the third world.
Since getting the first job on Fiverr is the most difficult thing to achieve on this platform, she chose to accept the proposal of these hunters of the unwary. In less than 4 days she delivered a job that in my case would take me a month of life, they immediately sent to her email a "receipt" where she highlighted the amount: $7,000 in her name, which would be reflected in her account once she paid a commission of $350 that would later be returned to her account.
She mentioned to them that the $350 was never mentioned to her, on the other hand, this amount is exactly what her mother's cancer treatment costs, something that obviously causes her a lot of anguish. The scammers told her that there was no problem, that the money would be reimbursed by "the company", that she should trust them.
Unfortunately she trusted them and sent the money for her mother's treatment in the hope that the payment would be released. Unfortunately these people never made the gesture of releasing the funds for my friend, after she gave them the money they went up in smoke, disappeared off the map and she never heard from them again.
I couldn't leave her like that, I know her and I know what an honest and good person she is. I helped her raise the funds for her mother's treatment and fortunately we achieved the goal.
I must say that if something looks too good to be true it usually is not. We as investors know about these things because we have experienced them (at least I have). In the working world an employee should not pay his employer, in my view that is a form of medieval serfdom.
Also a scammer is a person without scruples, therefore your personal tragedy does not matter to him, for these people you are their way to earn money without effort and they will do whatever it takes to convince you to give it to them.
There are also websites that help to detect these scammers websites, such as Scamadviser, I suggest that in case of doubt use these tools before making a decision. I hope that this publication will be of help to whoever reads it and can escape from this type of scammers in time.
