- “Parcel mules” participate in a scam where they receive and send illegal packages.
- The reshipping scam is often disguised as employment, experts told Insider.
It was the leaf blowers that sounded the alarms.
Sure, the company email address with a misspelling was odd. And the promise of a $2,400-a-month base salary for a job that didn’t require much work sounded a little too good to be true.
But Stephen, who’s based in Louisiana and in his 30s but asked to keep his last name anonymous for privacy reasons, was in the thick of a long job search, having been out of work for about a year and a half. And Bimco Ship, the company he’d signed up to work for in March after it reached out to him via email, seemed to have just enough professionalism for him to give it the benefit of the doubt. Until the leaf blowers showed up.
Specifically, 10 leaf blowers, which Stephen estimated, based on product listings, were valued at more than $2,000 total, were delivered to his home at the end of March, he told Insider. His job, the company told him, was to open the external packages — not the actual items — verify the contents, put new shipping labels on the packages, and send them to wherever his employer instructed him.
That’s what he did when other packages, like one with a breast pump and another with hair clippers, arrived at his house. But while those other shipments had Stephen’s name on them, he said, the leaf blowers were addressed to someone else.
“I’m tearing off the shipping labels…
