Fraudulent online false employment scheme is hurting “many people in Portugal” – Portugal
The Public Ministry warned this Friday of a fraudulent scheme online through which people are recruited to work digitally, in a scam that promises earnings of hundreds of euros a day for small tasks that involve investing their own money.
According to a note published by the Office of Cybercrime of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), the scam is based on the job advertisement published on social networks. “This criminal method has affected many people in Portugal, including young people at the beginning of their professional careers and unemployed people looking for work. This type of victims are attracted by promises of high returns with small investments and no risk for the capital applied”, says the PGR not note.
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP), the criminal scheme begins by asking the victims to make direct contact, through which “they are always approached in an individual and personalized way, via WhatsApp messages or, sometimes, by Telegram”.
Victims are told that they have been selected for an online job, which they can “do from home, which will earn you amounts of a few hundred euros a day”, simply by “performing small tasks online”, and, revealed the PGR , “the narrative and staging used by various criminal groups is varied”, but most cases involve simulating purchases on the Internet, but without “effectively materializing”.
“Although this activity assumes that victims spend money, they are always promised that all of them will be returned to them, plus a commission. In all these situations, criminals provide victims with access to a cryptocurrency wallet, which they must use in the despite being fraudulent, such platforms seek to imitate, in the eyes of the common user, well-known academic commerce platforms”, explains the PGR’s cybercrime office.
The way in which criminals act is also to require victims to open an account on the platform binancewhere they must buy cryptocurrencies with their money, which they then have to transfer to the account on the fraudulent platform.
“After completing the tasks, in the first days of the process, apparently the amounts spent are effectively returned to you, plus commissions, which are deposited in the fraudulent platform account, so that you can continue to spend these amounts”, explains the note. .
However, explains the PGR, the information produced by the fraudulent platform is false, simulating through Software incorporated false purchases and transfers, as well as “amounts supposedly earned as commissions”.
The criminal activity then consists of convincing people deluded with fictitious gains to spend even higher amounts on the purchase of cryptocurrencies that they continue to transfer to the fraudulent platform, in amounts that reach “several thousand euros”.
“When the victim finally realizes that the whole scheme is fraudulent and confronts the platform representatives, they cancel his account, thus preventing the victim from accessing it. WhatsApp or Telegram. In some cases, they deactivate the platform itself, which is no longer available online and administrative disappears “, explains the PGR.
Criminal networks have built several platforms of this nature “which appear and disappear according to the permission of criminal agents”: “When one of them disappears, its owners immediately open another one, of the same content, in another location on the Internet”.
The PGR also mentions that the victims, “usually, do not verify that the information on the platform about who owns it and what are the respective contacts is non-existent (for example, a physical office or telephone is never indicated)”.
The note adds that victims do not realize that legitimate platforms that the scam tries to copy, such as Amazon or Aliexpress, are automatically with altered domain addresses, containing, for example, incorrect or additional characters.
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