New Braunfels woman falls victim to job scam

New Braunfels, Texas – This summer, scammers have taken advantage of Central Texans looking for work. The promise of a well-paying job can sometimes lead criminals to take your money or obtain your personal information.

In recent months, the Better Business Bureau has received about a dozen reports of job scams in the area. FOX 7 Austin spoke to a Central Texas woman who was offered what she thought was a work-from-home job, but it turned out to be a pretty sophisticated scam.

“I was just trying to find something part-time that I could do from home after my 9 to 5 job,” said one New Braunfels woman, who asked that her name not be used.

The woman found a job offer on a well-known employment site.

“There were a couple of open positions, from customer service to data entry to administrative assistants. But they were all supposedly work-from-home positions,” she said.

A few days later, she had an interview for a data processing position.

“They posed me as a Teams user, which made it look like I was legitimate,” he said.

But when it came time for the interview, it wasn’t face to face.

“Everything was done first by email and then by text,” she said. “I never spoke to a human being, ever. And that struck me as odd. But then I thought maybe that’s how things are done these days.”

She was soon informed that she had gotten the job and received an email from who she thought was someone from Human Resources.

“It says human resources. It tells you what the next steps are. They have an employee portal. You have to log in to be able to follow the steps,” she said.

The woman says the fact that there was an employee portal made the situation seem legitimate.

“They sent me a letter with an offer and a W-4 form to fill out. They gave me all the information about payroll benefits,” she said.

Some of the wording in the emails struck her as a bit odd, she said, though nothing obvious. But the big red flag came when the conversation turned to setting up her office to work from home.

“When he started telling me that I had to sign up for this portal to get the equipment and that once I received it, I would get my money back, I said, ‘Yeah, no.'”

They even asked him to photocopy his credit card and send it to them.

“I told her I told her and she got really rude to me,” he said. “At that point I said, ‘No, I’m done, I’m leaving.'”

“If you have that hunch, you have to go with it. In this case, that’s exactly what this person did,” said Heather Massey, vice president of communications for Better Business Bureau Serving the Heart of Texas.

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Massey says work-from-home scams like this are on the rise. Some come from fake companies, others from scammers posing as real companies.

Either way, having to pay money for equipment should be a big red flag.

“No legitimate company is going to charge you anything right away,” Massey said.

And this has a tricky twist too: someone offers you a check to buy office equipment.

“And then he comes back and says, ‘Hey, we overpaid you,’ we need you to send us a few hundred dollars. That’s a red flag,” Massey said.

Massey says you should avoid high-pressure job offers that promise quick money, and situations where people contact you instead of the other way around. Also, be very wary of jobs that involve repackaging and shipping merchandise.