Fake Employers Also Trying to Recruit Money Mules

Kent Clare

Other Belizeans are also being recruited as ‘money mules’ to harvest the proceeds of these crimes and to transfer the value to third parties. F.I.U.’s Kent Clare says account holders who permit their accounts to be used in this manner will have their assets frozen. In fact, several suspects are currently being questioned.

Kent Clare, Director, F.I.U. Belize

“They compromise the first bank account. They typically need a money mule, so to speak, who is going to be the person, who is going to be their partner in crime unknowingly. What you are going to see is that, we see quite a few advertisements on Facebook and other social media for people who are promoting jobs. I actually was watching some breaking news today and so on, and even there in the commentary there is always somebody talking about, I made three thousand dollars working from home. You can contact me and hit me up if you want to, those are typically fraudsters. There are people who don’t have the full employment or partial or no employment and they are looking for jobs and we respect that. But, be careful of people who come to you and want to utilize your bank account to facilitate. How it works, they hit you up and say we have a job for you and we are going to give you some kind of mythical job description whereby you are going to review this and then when you are done they are going to say, here is what we want you to do. We want you to test the assignment and how well you handled the assignment. We are going to put some money in your account and you are going to remit to us the vast majority and you keep a small amount to yourself. That is your first week’s pay. And, persons would think it is legitimate. What we have also seen a lot of, using virtual assets to repatriate the funds. So, what they might ask you to do is to buy this digital card, apple cards, these tokens people use for gaming and so on, go and purchase them locally and then send me the code. When you have done that, you just became a part of the criminal activity.”