You find yourself in Costa Rica, wanting to hang around a while, but you need money. You begin looking for that great online job you sometimes see offered. Big money, short hours, minimal effort required. You search Flexjobs and Facebook, scan Tiktok and Reels and you find the one (of many) that says you can make easy cash working an hour a day. Sounds about as legit as fortune telling but you bite. You are given an 8-digit onboarding code and transferred to a whatsapp number.
The Whatsapp number has an NYC area code. One used mostly for businesses. You can tell early in the text communication that English is not the first language of the person on the other end. Weird phrasing and grammar, even an occasional misspelled word. They could be anyone, a Nigerian cryptoscammer, an Albanian counterfeiter, somebody buried in the bowels of a massive Mumbai call center. You recheck the information you have given them at this point name, email, whats app, age and nationality. You wonder– Is it enough info for them to steal your identity?
The photo on the Whatsapp shows an attractive woman of around 40, in a business blazer and leather skirt. She stares at the camera confidently, a slight smile on her glossed lips. You run a google image search and find the same photo for a real estate agent for a major international company, located in another large eastern US city. Her name is different from the name of the person you are communicating with.
There is no interview, no phone call, just an immediate question, “Are you here to learn about work?” You make an appointment for the following morning, and ask which time zone they are in. They respond, 9 (GMT-4). She says she will contact you at 9 the next morning, which you take to mean 7 am. You tell her you will await her contact. She responds, “I can introduce it to you first.”
Then she tells you, in the same paragraph that the job only takes 20-40 minutes a day, and in almost the next sentence, tells you 1 to 2 hours a day. She tells you the job is ‘worth $7,500 a month’, and then says the daily commission is between $50-$100. She then asks, ‘Can you understand what I am saying?, as if you are speaking a different language.
The next morning you receive a message at about 20 minutes past seven. They ask if you are ready to start work now. You say maybe, but first you have one question: Will there be some kind of payment involved in order to get started? They answer, at first saying that you don’t need to invest anything to get started. A couple of sentences later comes this caveat: “To be honest, this job may require a temporary advance of funds at some point.” You respond to the final sentence by saying that you do not do advance payments of any kind for online work.
They respond by writing: “Dear, this is only a rare situation. In most cases, you can complete the task for free and get a commission.” At this point it all seems like a troll job, though it is hard to say who is trolling whom. You no longer respond. A few hours later, a final message, like the last flare from a sinking ship: “If you still need job, please let me know. I will introduce you now.”
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Don Mateo
