En español | After years of babysitting for neighborhood kids and her own beloved grandchildren, Beth Palzet figured she'd earn some extra cash by posting her availability and qualifications on Care.com, a legitimate and widely used website for caregivers.
Soon she received a query from "Nancy Wagner." I'm living overseas, the person wrote, but am about to come to the U.S. — would you be able to watch my two preschoolers? After exchanging cellphone text messages and emails, Palzet was told she was hired. Wagner even offered to pay in advance.
The babysitter overpayment scam is back. And Palzet, a 61-year-old AARP member from Illinois, almost got caught up in it.
Her experience is typical of this ruse, which made headlines in 2010, prompting warnings from the Better Business Bureau and other organizations.
The pattern is that a scammer answers a caregiver's online ad, using a fake name. Once an agreement is struck — typically without a face-to-face meeting or even a phone conversation — the "client" sends a check as advance payment for the promised work.
But the check is for considerably more than the amount discussed. The caregiver is told to deposit the check and quickly wire the excess back to the supposed employer or some other party. Guess what? After a week or so, the check proves to be counterfeit, and the victim is responsible for all the money that went to the scammer.
In Palzet's case, the check was for $2,700. Of that, $500 was her "first payment" and the rest was to be sent via a Western Union wire transfer to a "businessman" who would use the funds to buy toys for Nancy Wagner's children.
"The fact that [Wagner] and I never spoke or that she didn't request a face-to-face meeting before hiring me seemed plausible, since she said she was out of the country," Palzet said. "My photo and qualifications are posted — and since she said she lives abroad, I figured that's how they do things."
But in the end, Palzet wasn't buying it. She contacted Scam Alert and was advised not to forward the $2,200 and to wait for the deposited check to prove counterfeit. That happened two days later as the check was issued on a nonexistent account.
Overpayment checks also figure in other work-at-home jobs, in online auctions and sales, and in phony sweepstakes and lottery schemes.
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