Rip-Off Alert | Victims lose $1M in work-from-home scam

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LAS VEGAS (KSNV My News 3) – Finding part-time work online can be a risky business. In this Rip-Off Alert, con men could target you next in a million-dollar scam that's claiming a large numbers of victims.

She needed to pay her son’s hospital bills. So the stay-at-home mom decided to look for part-time work she could do from the house to help her family make ends meet. “I got an e-mail back, saying that someone wanted to interview me . . . and said that my resume met their qualifications,” Voeld said.

She was told she needed to register with Yahoo Messenger for an interview. Once she did, they said the data entry job was hers. “They would send me a check through the mail for the software I needed for the position,” Voeld said.

But she was stunned when she received a $3,000 check. She became suspicious. “They never saw me, they never spoke to me on the phone,” she said. “Why would they trust me with money?”

She took the check to her local bank and quickly learned it was worthless. “If I had just turned it in and spent all this money, I don’t have the money to pay back $3,000,” she said. “I’m a new mom. We’re newly married. We don’t have money.”

Postal inspectors say the idea of making a little extra money is appealing to many people, and con artists know it.

U.S. Postal Inspector Burt Foster explains how the scam works: “Use a certain amount of those funds to buy the software that you need to do this job – they will tell you one of two things. Either send it back to us or send it to a third party,” Foster said.

If you deposit the bad check and send back the remaining money out of your account, you’ll quickly learn you’ve been scammed. Your funds are gone. She was smart to take the check to the bank to be inspected, but her case has launched a bigger case.

“We have people in this investigation that have significantly lost funds,” Foster said.

Inspectors say there are 121 victims linked to the suspects involved in this case and $1 million in losses.