Independent contractor, IC – Virtually Yours PA

Below is an email that turned up in my spam inbox. Sometimes I will have a look at what’s in there just for the fun of it. This email caught my attention and with the time of year that we’re in I thought I’d do a post on fraud. The email is in it’s full unedited form.

It’s the holiday season and now more than ever fraud is happening everywhere. The fraud in this particular email is having goods delivered to your address, and then you repack them and ship them to somewhere else. There are so many red flags with this but here’s the main things you need to be aware of. When someone uses stolen credit information to purchase items the first place that the police or federal authorities are going is the delivery address, your address. Even though you don’t have the goods on premises you can be charged with receiving stolen goods for starters.

The second thing is, how are you going to get your money when you’ve done all these things? By the fraudsters stealing more money to pay you. If you’ve given them your bank details to make things easier, then they could just rob you.

So please be careful when these work from home emails come into your mailbox unsolicited, they are never ever as good as they seem.Be cautious about what you take on for work.

Have a safe and secure week

******************** Fraud Email Alert****************************

Phyllis Frey <alvarezowcjosetv@outlook.com>

Mon 11/13/2017, 9:40 AM

We suggest you to apply for a absolutely real home based position in the shipping industry with a paycheck of 2500 USD per month and with no startup costs. The full-time position is provided by a legitimate American mail forwarding firm.

The employer trusts in the work from home techniques, because it provides a chance to decrease warehousing expenses and offer logistics points across the USA.

Job Responsibilities:

– Stay at your address to receive packages delivered to your address via UPS/Fedex/USPS within standard working hours from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM on a daily basis.

– Download the list of current deliveries, your day to day tasks, and the prepaid shipping labels.

– Review parcels and take and upload pictures of the contents of every parcel.

– Combine shipments in certain cases.

– Resend the mail to customers by printing and applying labels and sending the parcels to the nearest USPS and Fedex sites.

Job Requirements:

– US citizenship with a postal address.

– Degree is regarded, but not essential.

– Capability to act on your own with minimum supervision.

– Ability to deal with packages up to 25 pounds.

If this role sounds like you, do not hesitate to apply. For this, please answer to this email with your phone number:

– Your contact number

and our HR manager will be happy to get in touch with you.

I’m not a big user of social media, and when they started popping up and becoming popular, like everyone else I signed up to all the various ones. But lately I’ve been exploring just how social media works, and how it can help a business like mine. As a freelance professional finding your way around marketing and promoting is always an issue. Yes there are companies and other freelancers that are available to do the job and will most definitely do a very good job, but sometimes you have to learn what you’re paying for, and how to know if it’s being done right.

One of the things that I’ve learned from my exploration is not all social media is a good fit. For instance sites like Pintrest, Tumbler, Instagram, Vimeo, Flickr are great for sharing things that are more visual like pictures and videos. If you work in any industry that does a lot of visuals, videos, pictures, these sites are great for Marketing, photography, retail, fashion and such.These sites are great as they use minimal words and maximum eye catching visual. All you need is a title, a great photo and off you go.

Industries that are more focused on things like administration, accounting, project management, writing, etc., then sites like Twitter will be great for you. With Twitter you can add links from your blogs, other sites or links to work that you wish to share with your followers. Twitter tends to be more versatile when it comes to sharing. You can add pictures only, or you can add write-ups to like to whatever articles or sites you’re talking about.

So figuring out which site is best for your type of business is the first step in looking at your social media. So take a look and see if you’re signed up to the right site for you.

As I continue my explorations there will be more to follow. So check out your social media. And I’ll keep you informed about hashtags, following people, and promoting. From one social media newbie to another don’t sign up to something before you check it out fully and see if it’s right for you. I’ll look at Facebook, LinkedIn and Blogs in a later post.

Category: Independent contractor, IC

Don’t get caught in a fraud scam!