Is this person doing illegal money transfers?

Question

This girl that I'm friends with and have actually seen in person before, keeps posting [on social media] that she "loves when the transfer goes through" and gets $2000-$6000 for free quite often. She said you can make up to $6500 a day. She is not very smart and barely spells correctly. She keeps saying that all she is doing is "transfers" and that's it. So many of my friends are feeding into this crap. So I asked her what it is. She basically said "it's legit" and asked me for my bank username and password so she could see how much money to deposit into my account. I said no way and left it at that. She also said she is not stealing or doing anything illegal. She is getting her friends free money and I think they're naive. What is she actually doing? Is it illegal? I am sure she is incapable of doing crazy money wiring to different countries.

Thank you everyone for answering my question. I am not stupid, I did not give her my information. I knew she was up to something illegal, so thank you for giving me some input on what exactly she is doing. I submitted an anonymous tip to my local sheriff's department. I'm hoping they see it and pursue it, or forward it to the right authorities I.e the FBI or something.

Answer 1

She is laundering money for criminals, either knowingly or unknowingly.

There are lots of ways to make a fraudulent money transfer from an account one does not own. Stolen credit card numbers, direct debit fraud, phished PayPal logins or online banking trojans are some examples.

Unfortunately (for the criminals) when a customer informs their bank that someone made a transfer from their account they did not authorize, then the bank will usually reverse that transfer and inform the authorities. So criminals can not directly wire these transfers into their personal accounts. The stolen money would disappear and they would get caught.

That's where so-called "mules" come in. Mules are people who are hired by criminals to receive such dirty money and move it to a different account controlled by the criminals. When the transfer gets reversed, two things happen:

1. The transfer from victim to mule gets reversed, but not the transfer from mule to criminal, so the mule loses their money while the criminal keeps theirs. That means the person who is the actual victim in the scheme is the mule.
2. Law enforcement gets suspicious of the mule and might knock on their door.

Your "friend" is either one of these mules or is in the business of recruiting mules.

Answer 2

What is she actually doing? Is it illegal?

She is running some kind of scam and it is illegal. Quite often these are fronts. Generally people get suspicious if they haven't seen anyone. So you social engineer and someone like this girl would boost in her circle. The fact that she is making $6500 a day is unverified claim. I can say I make 1 million a day :)

There is no free money. It is wise of you not to share your Bank details. Stay away as far as possible.

Note depending on the country and regulation you could be in trouble with authorities for even knowing / suspecting that someone is committing fraud and not informing authorities.

Answer 3

She claimed that she makes money. When you wanted to make some too, she asked for your account credentials - which are only needed to take money away, never to give.

The simplest explanation would be loan scam: Even if you have only $10 on your account, you can lose much more - the trick is that someone using your credentials can take an online loan in your name, and steal that money. If the scheme is long-running, she'll be taking new loans and using the money to pay back the earlier ones, building up credit history for her victims - only to allow taking even bigger loans. Her victims see the incoming transfers and are happy about the scheme "working". Until she decides that the pot is big enough to cash it in and disappear, leaving everyone deep in debt.

Those who fell for this could be already defaulting loans they have no idea about and the loan companies have no way of notifying them, because she redirected the contact details.

Never reveal your password. Nobody needs your password for any legitimate purpose.

Answer 4

This will end badly, the only question is how long it will take.

Performing bank transfers is not difficult and there is no way a 3rd party would be paying her large sums of money to perform these transfers unless the purpose was illegitimate and they were taking advantage of her.

In my experience it is as simple as entering the target bank account routing and account #, entering the name (this is not double-checked by the bank to associate with the target account), entering a dollar amount and then agreeing to the terms of the transfer--there are not people out there who have a lot of money but would rather pay somebody $2000+ to do 2 minutes of work in an unofficial capacity instead of just doing it themselves unless they are trying to hide something and/or take advantage of a mark.

Answer 5

They will pay, that's for sure. It's something common in many countries. Sometimes it is stolen money like Philipp said. Sometimes is money from mafia or terrorist groups that needs to be transferred so they use naive people whose profile wouldn't be suspicious if they get sums of money. They will look your past transactions to determine the amount of money they could transfer to you without alerting someone. Why?

Because lets say you are a criminal. If you sell 10 kilos of cocaine, some bombs or girls for prostitution and receive the money lets say one million dollars in just one deposit in one bank account, someone will be knocking at your door very soon, it will be easy to prove the illegal source of the founds and you get nothing.

If you have 25 guys working for you and they receive transfers and deposits of less amount frequently, from let's say 150 different accounts belonging to account holders with no criminal record. It is harder to be noticed and you could say they are legal activities (15000 a month received from entrepreneurs or 2500 from a housewife is not too much). It will be harder to prove that all the transactions come from illegal money and by the time it is proven usually the money has already gone somewhere else (by using another network of mules like your friend's).

I don't know the laws where you are, but this is illegal in many countries. If you enter they won't let you out of the network, and when something goes wrong you will need to explain a lot.