Still pushing work-at-home schemes on the Internet? The Federal Trade Commission has a message for you.
On Wednesday, the FTC will announce a major “law enforcement sweep cracking down on job and work-at-home fraud fueled by the economic downturn,” the agency said.
Investigators will release “[s]till shots from the Web sites of some of the operators charged in this law enforcement sweep,” as well as a consumer-protection video.
The FTC disclosed few details about the sweep, but it is known that officials from the the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service will attend the news conference.
Speaking on behalf of the Justice Department will be Assistant Attorney General Tony West of the Civil Division. West was appointed to the post by President Obama in January 2009.
Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray also will be present at the news conference.
West, a law-enforcement veteran knowledgeable about high-tech crimes, is a graduate of both Harvard and Stanford . He has served as a prosecutor on both the state and federal levels, including a five-year stint as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.
As a state Special Assistant Attorney General, West advised former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on high-tech crime, identity theft, antitrust litigation, civil rights, police-officer training and police misconduct.
Although the FTC did not release specific details about the crackdown, work-at-home schemes come in many forms. Fraudsters, for example, often use high-traffic Internet sites operated by famous companies to post “job” listings for jobs that don’t actually exist.
In some instances, the “jobs” have proven to be multilevel-marketing “opportunities” in which participants must pay a fee to become a sales rep and to recruit others for a chance to increase “earnings.” In other cases, the “jobs” have proven to be scams such as stuffing envelopes, entering data and labeling postcards.
Such scams frequently target people of limited means.
“Work-at-home scams prey on some of the most vulnerable in our society — the economically disadvantaged, the unemployed, the disabled, and the elderly — who are trying to supplement their income by working from home,†U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said earlier this month.
Bharara is U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Of New York. On Feb. 3, Bharara and postal inspectors announced the arrests of Philip Pestrichello, 38, and his wife, Rosalie Florie, also 38, in a work-at-home scheme that operated in New Jersey.
In the alleged Pestrichello/Florie scheme, participants were targeted in advertisements that assured them the companies were ethical and “NOT a gimmick or some shady ‘get rich quick scheme.’”
Participants further were told “Our company has a rock-solid reputation,” prosecutors said.
A check revealed that Pestrichello had spent three years in federal prison for operating a previous scheme and had repeated run-ins with regulators dating back to the early 1990s.