They may or may not have been innocent initially, but they quickly find out that their “job” is not on the level.
I know a guy named Richard, a real slimeball, who got into that. He knew what he was doing and kept on going.
Many people in the town used to drop off their UPS and FedEx packages at our office. When that started, we shipped so much that UPS came by every day. Naturally, when they brought the packages by, they had to have the shipping labels on the packages.
One day I walked up to the front of the office and there were two boxes on the table of hand scrawled addresses but not shipping labels. The addresses were to some place in Africa.
A few minutes later, my niece walked in. When I asked about Richard, she said that she saw his car down at the Dairy Queen. So I got in my car and went to confront him. He was there with his wife/girlfriend and her mother. He stayed with his wife/girlfriend until he burned through all of her money and left her destitute. Then he split.
I chewed Richard out in front of the few other people at the Dairy Queen. I told him that he had involved himself in a criminal organization and that he was involved with credit card fraud, identity theft, receiving stolen merchandise, and anything else I could think of. I told him that if he didn’t come get those packages in five minutes, he could pick them up from the sheriff’s office. He showed up immediately and picked up the packages. (I don’t think that he stayed long enough to eat.)
I’m told that one box had two Apple laptops and the other had a pair of roller blades. One of the employees at the Dairy Queen, the daughter of Tom (not his real hame), an old drinking buddy of mine from back in the 1970s, told me that he came up and tried to sell the laptops for half price, but everyone there had heard me chew him out and didn’t want to receive stolen property.
A month later, Tom told me that Richard had then got involved in receiving money orders, taking out his cut, and then sending the rest to his overlords in Africa. It didn’t take Richard long before he was persona non grata at the Western Union office at the grocery store at the county seat and was banned. After that, he tried to get others to do it from them, offering them a couple hundred dollars for the trouble. He had approached Tom about it, but Tom wisely refused.
After that, Richard started driving to Western Union offices at other places in the area, some a hundred or more miles away.
Soon after that our local Sheriff (an old family friend) retired and went on a long deserved vacation. Shortly after he returned, he told me that he had seen Richard’s car going the other way on a highway in the next state over, about 150 miles away. I started laughing and said that Richard must be having to branch out into other states to find a Western Union office that hadn’t banned him.
One of Richard’s neighbors asked me once why the Sheriff’s deputies were conducting surveillance on Richard. She said that they were out there many evenings, watching.
I don’t know if Richard knew he was becoming involved with scammers on day 1, but he definitely knew it before long and that didn’t stop him from continuing to assist them.
