"I was lucky I did not send the money," Young said. "I dodged a bullet there."
Christine Palmer wasn't as fortunate. In February, the single mother from New Britain, Connecticut who moonlights as the manager of a band, Enemy Remains, applied for a position advertised on Careerbuilder.com.
Flexible Gig
A woman named "Jennifer" from CS Office Services called to say she had the job, a flexible gig that paid by the assignment and required her to help process transactions.
On March 3, after a few weeks of online training, Palmer woke up to find that $98,000 had been deposited into her account at Bank of America Corp. An e-mail instructed her to withdraw $9,000 in cash and wire it to three individuals in the Ukraine via Western Union.
Then, Palmer was to transfer the rest of the funds to a Ukrainian bank account. As a fee, Palmer could keep $1,800 of the total. Before she'd completed the wire transfer, a man with an Eastern European accent called, urging her to speed things up.
"He sounded very concerned, which made me think I was going to lose my job," Palmer said.
Stolen Funds
It wasn't until a few days later, when Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America halted the wire transfer and told her the funds had been stolen, that Palmer realized CS Office Services didn't really exist, and that her employers were part of a criminal scheme.
Bank of America closed Palmer's account and told her she was responsible for paying back the $9,000 she'd wired overseas.