ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) – The U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the FBI seized and shut down 17 website domain names linked with work-from-home and reshipping scams on Thursday.
An investigation into this scam began in February 2021, when a scammer used someone else’s credit card to buy a virtual reality headset and had it sent to a home in Hazelwood.
According to a release from U.S. Attorney Sayler Fleming, the scammers tricked people looking for jobs into receiving stolen goods and then shipping those stolen items to another address controlled by the scammers.
People involved in this scam believed they were accepting legitimate work-from-home jobs with a real company. These people who unknowingly were a part of this scam were being used to insulate those conducting it from law enforcement.
According to U.S. Attorney Fleming’s release, investigators found multiple links that made them believe the scammers were in Russia.
A victim of the scam from Hazelwood believed they were taking a work-from-home position for a company called LocalPost as a quality control inspector. She was paid $20 to have a package delivered to her address, where she would take a picture of the product and then reship the items to another address.
The Hazelwood woman allowed investigators to use her login credentials to log on to the LocalPost online dashboard, where they discovered 25 packages shipped to the Hazelwood address. One of the items included a $1,500 laptop that was fraudulently purchased…
