by: Bobby Zimalis 
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In the digital world, sometimes looking for a job can reveal some unexpected situations.
This is the story of one of those unexpected journeys and a cautionary tale that reaffirms the old adage that ‘if something seems too good to be true, it usually is’…
How I almost unwittingly became a participant in financial fraud.
Like most would do, you start looking for a job: asking friends, family, old business contacts for any leads that they might have.
You take advantage of the Internet by registering at a few online ‘job portals’ like Indeed.com and others. You search for some jobs related to your field, submit your resume & apply for certain positions at certain companies (as they become available).
After many weeks of silence, you receive a very informal job proposal in your Inbox, from a company that you never heard of or even remember applying for a job at.
The initial contact goes something like this:
Your Spidey senses start to tingle a bit but since you’re not exactly being bombarded w/ other offers, you play along.
You reply w/ a basic: “Hi there .. definitely interested .. please send details” kind of message and within a few minutes of sending that out, you receive the Company form-style Introduction letter.
Besides the obvious grammatical errors (Red Flag #1), there’s not much to discern from this message.
A simple search for the name ‘Isabella Chow” & the company ‘Zeco Finance Inc‘ comes back pretty clean so you decide to visit the company website, zecofinanceinc.com. (no longer active) listed at the bottom of the page.
As a web designer for 15+ yrs, I can easily tell a cheap WordPress template when I see it and this website had all the telltale marks: cheap/stock images, lazy content gathering, formatting errors + a whole bunch of other pretty obvious stuff.
The address listed is just some generic office building in Montreal’s old-manufacturing district: nowadays, occupied mostly by telephone marketing agencies.
Next step is opening up the ‘job description’ PDF attached to the message to see what the ‘job’ actually is.
Reminder: I still haven’t been told what I would be doing.
The ‘job description’ PDF download opens like this ..
The document then continues to list a bunch of other random job positions w/ all their various requirements, training schedules and salaries..
Hmm.
You can download and view the ‘Job Description PDF’ in its full glory by clicking the link below.
After you received the PDF and look through it, they send you a ‘confirmation’ message congratulating you on landing this non-existent job listed in the job description document and ask you for some personal information: Name + Email for Bank Transfer of ‘payment’ and some picture id to confirm your identity.
Working online since roughly 2002, all my personal information is already out there so I really wasn’t too worried about identity theft and e-transfers ain’t something new.
Without even telling you which of those ‘positions’ listed in the PDF that you actually fill a spot for, they send you ‘YOUR FIRST TRAINING TASK!’ to complete and this is where the ‘money laundering’ part of the scam starts to reveal itself.
The ‘Instructions’ part of the training taks is where the scam reveals its devilish details ..
So, as most of you reading this have already concluded, your ‘job’ is to launder money (probably stolen from unsuspecting victims) into bitcoin and in essence, render it untraceable.
They send you a $2K e-transfer ‘payment’, you keep a whopping $50 bucks and withdraw the remainder and then you visit your local Bitcoin ATM machine and deposit the remainder, $1,950 into the Bitcoin account mentioned in the email.
The scam is so well thought-out and time-sensitive that they even direct you to the closest bitcoin ATM machine in your area.
Wow.
If you’re curious as to how much money this kind of Bitcoin scam can make, you’d be surprised ..
Checking the bitcoin wallet, in the 2 and a half months that this particular Zeco Finance inc scam ran, that particular wallet cleaned $121.000 dollars.
By far, the most important part of this scam is SPEED!
The scammers know they’ll eventually get caught or investigated so they RUSH everything: that’s why their emails come fast & furious.
I knew that I would never cross this line but, to be honest, a part of me wanted to just keep the $2,000 and hope that it would never be claimed as stolen.
If it was never claimed, the scammers would be out $2K but if it was claimed – 99% chance it will – my bank would ask me for the $2K back and the cops would have probably want to have a little conversation with me as well.
So, while the famous Isabelle Chow of Zeco Finance Inc kept sending me these ‘Where are you?’ emails, I quickly put together this blog post to let ppl know who ‘Zeco Finance Inc’ was if they did a Google search for it.
Within two weeks of putting this post together, all mentions of Zeco Finance Inc were scrubbed: website, phone numbers, email account and that specific Bitcoin wallet stopped making any more transactions.
The good guys won this battle and this specific Zeco Finance Inc Bitcoin scam was halted in short time but this kind of scam is just a basic business template.
As long as the following variables exist, this scam can be run over & over.
If you are unemployed and getting a little desperate for money, PLEASE be very weary of job proposals that come out of nowhere and ask you to do things like transfer ‘mystery’ money into Bitcoin.
You’re probably about to commit financial fraud.
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Welcome to ZIMALISDESIGN® - online portfolio & services website of Bobby Zimalis, a Freelance Web Designer, Content Writer & SEO, currently living in Chertsey, Quebec.
I can be contacted by:
tel/text (450) 977-6315 or
by E-Mail
www.zimalisdesign.com
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