How I Fell for a Job Scam and Lost Money
A very personal and slightly shameful story about me losing too much money to fraud
I moved to the U.S. many years ago and it took me a long time to improve my English and find a job. While I was doing that, I decided to find a short-term side hustle just to be occupied and make some money. I always enjoyed teaching and I had experience teaching the Russian language so I decided to join a few tutoring websites. New York had a huge community of immigrants who spoke Russian and I was curious if someone would be interested in the culture and connection.
After a few weeks, I got a request from a woman who wanted to hire a tutor for her son. He had a father in Russia and needed to speak a better language to spend his first summer there. The request was in English and had grammatical mistakes that I would expect from a foreigner. Considering, that the family was supposed to be Russian, it didn’t raise any suspicions. I was very excited to finally start working so I agreed to help her son to learn something new and talk about the cultural experience.
She told me that she was on a business trip and their nanny would bring her son for lessons. After chatting with her for some time, and developing a connection, she asked me to do her a favor. She told me that she was going to send me a check with money for my first lessons, but she would add money for the nanny and she needed me to send it to them.
Checks are curious and very old-fashioned money vehicles. They are almost non-existent in other countries due to mistakes and fraud, but in the U.S., you need them regularly. It’s not convenient, it’s expensive, and customers are not protected from check fraud, but it’s a traditional and accepted payment method.
As a new immigrant, I had never seen a check before, and I assumed they worked as bank transfers. I received a check from the mother and deposited it into my bank account in Bank of America. Money became available almost immediately, although the transaction was still pending. Seeing the balance grow made me feel safe enough, and the mother was urging me to send the leftover money to the nanny immediately. I wanted to prove that I could be trusted and I didn’t want to keep money that belonged to someone else, so I was happy to send them.
The mother gave me detailed instructions on how to send a wire from Wells Fargo. The nanny’s name was an unexpected male African name but who am I to judge. I sent the money from a bank branch, the cashier didn’t ask any questions, and I felt good about being efficient and that someone trusted me.
By this time, it had been almost two weeks and I still hadn’t met the boy that I was supposed to be tutoring, and I started to feel weird about this. I googled the situation and found out that I might be a victim of a job scam. I called Bank of America immediately and they told me that nothing could be done. My checking balance was depleted the next day after I sent the wire, the check was obviously fraudulent. Wells Fargo said that they couldn’t stop the wire and they couldn’t give me any information about their client.
I felt ashamed and stupid, and only after reading about signs of fraud online, I recognized them in my circumstances. Still reeling from what happened, I decided to visit a local police precinct. The police officer laughed at me first, then told me that there was no crime because I gave money to the fraudster myself. I left the precinct determined to never talk to law enforcement officers ever again in my life. I reported the scam to many places online, including the Postal Inspection Service, but no one ever replied to me.
This intense shame and the feeling that no one could help me stayed with me for many years. It fueled my decision to move my career from anti-corruption and compliance investigations to financial crimes and fraud prevention and to become a certified fraud examiner.
When I look back at what happened, I ask myself why banks allow money to become available immediately, why they accept obviously fraudulent checks, and why it takes two to five days for them to recognize that a check is fraudulent. Considering that 680,000 cases of check fraud were reported to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network last year, it seems that the problem has been ignored for a long time.
