Single mother-of-two loses entire life savings over complex Chinese job scam

A Melbourne mother looking for work has lost thousands of dollars and is struggling to feed her kids after a seemingly innocent job ad roped her into an international scam.

Mel Anderson was simply trying to find a respectable cleaning job when she spotted a job posted on a social media forum that offered her the opportunity to work from home without having to put her children in daycare.

Jumping at the chance to spend time with her children, Anderson said she had no idea the Airbnb website she was being trained on was fake, with everything about her new steady job manufactured by overseas scammers.

Anderson thought she was working for Airbnb but little did she know the job, which offers people the opportunity to “earn good money” and still work from home, now has its own warning on the Federal Government’s Scam Watch website.

Speaking to 7NEWS, Anderson, who lost $23,800 in total, said she had every detail ready for the police and wanted her story shared everywhere so others don’t lose their hard-earned money as she did.

“I didn’t want to actually work online, I just wanted to do cleaning jobs. They target any group on Facebook and send you a message that you can work these hours online, get paid this amount, everything is done to pull you in,” she said.

The job catches people because it doesn’t offer millions, instead, it offers a steady commission income that Anderson saw as a perfect opportunity for her and her children to start fresh after a family break-up.

“They start grinding you from the moment you click on talking with them, logging into a web page which they provide you creating an account,” she said.

“You’re using this legitimate-looking page for Airbnb, they just basically teach and guide you into doing something with them on a training account, all just making recommendations for Airbnb and earning small, small commissions at a time.”

Given a separate bank account when she started, Anderson earned small commission amounts from the would-be scammers.

It wasn’t until later in the training that she was asked to “recharge” so she could get “access” to her commissions.

This recharge demand quickly spiralled into a large debt with the scammers continuing to promise she’d soon get it all back.

“You end up having to recharge once, and it’s something like $40, nothing much Australian, and they’re telling you all what you’re going to get today. You’re going to get $200 if you finish this. So you think, oh, $40 isn’t much,” she said.

“They start to control you a lot more, but then they’re telling you they want this much and this much and this much until you end up, like I did, with an empty bank account, and then demanding $27,000.”

Making the scam even more sinister, the scammers create a fake person throughout the training process who pretends to be in the training with you.

That fake person spoke to Anderson, telling her about issues they were facing which encouraged Anderson to open up and speak about her concerns about handing so much money over.

This fake co-worker eventually groomed Anderson into handing more cash to the scammers.

“They had someone pretending to be in the same position as me, telling me, ‘Oh, I do have the money that I’m going to ask my friends to borrow, my family to borrow, so then I can pay them back when everything’s finished’ And of course, going on with me, it was going on for them,” she said.

“By the time I realised she wasn’t a real person, it was too late, the damage was done.”

Anderson lost almost $30,000 and initially didn’t want to tell a soul due to the shame of being scammed out of the money.

She remained on the website and, under constant pressure, was encouraged to sell some of her valuables in an attempt to get her money back.

“They’re telling me to get rid of your car, sell your car, jewellery, and then I was like, ‘I can’t and I won’t’,” Anderson said.

Instead of blocking and wiping her computer, Anderson kept in contact with the fake co-worker to learn more about the scam and to gather evidence to hand over to the police.

“Obviously you’re not meant to keep in contact with scammers or anything. But I wanted to see if I could keep in contact to show the police,” she said.

“I’ve got two small children and not much spare time at the moment, but I wanted to keep in contact and see what was going to happen with this website ... they have locked me out of my account anyway, my money is not there, which is pretty standard.

“But this person, who was my side groomer, was saying, ‘I finished my batch, and now I’ve got this much’, and it was something like $US31,000. They were still promising that I would get a big pay up and all of this stuff if I continued clicking on the buttons.”

Upon realising what had happened, and how much control the scammers had, Anderson contacted her bank to cancel everything and has not used her computer since, fearing the remote access app still on there would mean the scammers would be able to take the little she had left.

“I got everything cancelled, blocked my net bank, so I can’t use NET bank until I do a factory reset and then get my computer checked as well as they could still be on there,” she said.

“They obviously have a very sophisticated system going on with what they’re doing, the whole business is run out of China, I even have the address. I have the information on where they’re located, and their name, their business name, and all this sort of stuff as well.”

Anderson said she still feels the weight of the mistake she made, wishing she had never looked for work in the first place, and still had her hard earned savings in the bank.

Anderson has now started a GoFundMe to try and keep her family afloat.

“It’s a bit of a struggle with single parents. I’m taking time off to look after my children, who are one and two. And money’s not easy to come by. So I was looking to do some work and now I wish I never looked for work,” she said.