A parent/client recently sent me a link to a CNBC news article discussing a Saskatoon mom named Patricia Feeney, who is supposedly earning almost $7,000 per month working part-time from her home.
On reading
this article, I figured it seems too
good to be true. If it is true ….sign me up. So I Googled , Patricia Feeney of Saskatoon to see if she was an actual person,
with a phone number and address. And
what did I find...well it turns out that there is also a Patricia Feeney of Yorkton and I am sure there are hundreds of
other Patricia Feeneys out there as well.
As you
will note from the Yorkton This Week newspaper article below, this is a
scam. Patricia Feeney of Yorkton
or for that matter Saskatoon doesn’t exist.
You will note that, the CNBC report
does not say what she is doing to earn all this money. In fact, the Yorkton newspaper reports it’s
actually not a CNBC website at all and that the article is a front for www.realinconline.com.
The newspaper advises…if you click
anywhere on the faux-CNBC page, it takes you directly to the Real Online Income
site, where you can sign up “in the next 60 seconds,” and “gain access to a
work-at-home job paying as much as $87 an hour.”, and the only way you can find
out is by entering your personal information.
The newspaper quotes, Cst. Tyler Buchanan of the RCMP’s commercial crimes unit in Saskatoon as saying: It’s a variation of a service scam. A lot of times what you get for this is identity theft.
He explained this type of fraud pre-dates the Internet. The classic variation was the old secret shopper routine. It goes like this: You receive a letter in the mail from someone claiming to be a company that conducts evaluations of retailers saying you have been “selected.” All you have to do is send them a cheque for your training materials and shopping “certification.”
For more information and resources on fraud awareness, visit
the Government of Canada’s Anti-Fraud Centre:
www.antifraudcentre.ca
