Have you received an online job offer with the promise of earning hundreds of euros a day? could be a scam

Prosecutors this Friday warned of a fraudulent “online scheme” through which people are recruited for digital work, a scam that promises to earn hundreds of euros a day for small tasks involving the investment of one’s own money.

According to a memo released this Friday by the Attorney General’s Office of Cybercrime (PGR), the scam is based on a job posting posted on social media.

“This criminal method has affected many victims in Portugal, including young people at the beginning of their professional careers and unemployed people looking for work. This type of victim is attracted by the promise of high returns on a small investment and no risk to the capital invested.” , says the PGR note.

According to the State Department (MP), the criminal scheme begins with the victims being asked to establish direct contact, whereby “they are always addressed individually and personally, via WhatsApp messages or sometimes Telegram.”

Victims are told that they have been selected for “online work” which they can “do from home, which will earn you a few hundred euros a day”, simply by “doing small tasks ‘online'”, and that, PGR reported, ” the storytelling and staging used by the various gangs varies”, but in most cases it is a simulation of online shopping, but without “effective materialization”.

“Although this activity involves the victims spending money, they are always promised that all of this 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 their activities. . Such wallets are invariably created on unknown platforms controlled by criminal agents. Although such platforms are fraudulent, they tend to mimic well-known e-commerce platforms in the eyes of the average user,” explains the PGR cybercrime department.

The criminals’ modus operandi also requires victims to open an account on the Binance platform, where they must buy cryptocurrencies with their money, which they must then transfer to an account on the fraudulent platform.

“After completing the tasks, in the first days of the process, apparently, the amounts spent are actually returned to you, plus commissions that are credited to the account of the fraudulent platform so that you can continue to spend these amounts,” the note explains. . . .

However, PGR explains, the information generated by the fraudulent platform is false, simulating false purchases and transfers, as well as “amounts allegedly earned as commissions” using the built-in “software”.

The criminal activity then consists of persuading people, deceived by fictitious incomes, to spend even larger sums to buy cryptocurrencies, which 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 presents this to the representatives of the platform, they close his account, thereby depriving the victim of access to it. Criminal agents can no longer be contacted via WhatsApp or Telegram. In some cases, they deactivate the platform itself, which thus ceases to be available “online” and indeed disappears,” explains PGR.

Criminal networks have created several platforms of this kind, “that appear and disappear at the will of criminal agents”: “When they make one of them disappear, its owners immediately open another, of the same content, elsewhere on the Internet. “.

PGR also mentions that victims “generally do not verify that the information on the platform about who owns it and what the relevant contacts are does not exist (for example, no physical office or phone numbers are ever provided).”

The note adds that the victims do not realize that the legitimate platforms that the scammers are trying to copy, such as Amazon or Aliexpress, are presented with altered domain addresses containing, for example, incorrect or extra characters.