By Nathaniel Popper

纳撒尼尔·波普(Nathaniel Popper)

After the fitness center where Denise Newton worked closed down in April because of the coronavirus, she posted her résumé online to look for a new job. She soon got a call from a company she had never heard of.

丹妮丝·牛顿(Denise Newton)所在的健身中心因冠状病毒而于4月关闭后，她在网上发布了自己的简历以寻找新工作。 她很快接到了一家从未听说过的公司打来的电话。

The woman who phoned from the company, Heies, invited Newton to apply for a job as a “local hub inspector.” When she started work in May, Newton began receiving boxes with Apple Watches and laptops in them. Her job was to open the boxes, check the contents and then mail them off to foreign addresses.

从公司打电话给海耶斯的那位妇女邀请牛顿申请“地方枢纽检查员”的工作。 牛顿在5月开始工作时，牛顿开始接收装有Apple Watch和笔记本电脑的盒子。 她的工作是打开盒子，检查内容，然后将其邮寄到国外地址。

But something was off. The boxes were suspiciously plain, even though they included brand-name products. The name on the labels was never Newton’s. When she asked questions, her new employer stopped responding. In June, she reported Heies to the Better Business Bureau.

但是出事了。 这些盒子虽然装了名牌产品，但还是很可疑。 标签上的名字从来不是牛顿的。 当她问问题时，她的新雇主停止了回应。 六月，她向商业改善局报告了Heies。

It turned out that Newton had become what is known in security circles as a money mule, an accomplice who, either knowingly or unknowingly, helps international criminal rings move their ill-gotten gains. In Newton’s case, swindlers appeared to be buying products in the United States with stolen money and then mailing them — using unwitting intermediaries like her to disguise their involvement — to overseas locations where the goods could be resold for cash.

事实证明，牛顿已经成为安全圈中所谓的钱m子，一个帮凶，有意或无意地帮助国际犯罪集团转移其不义之财。 以牛顿为例，骗子似乎是在美国用被盗的钱购买产品，然后使用不知情的中介人(例如她)掩盖其涉嫌将其邮寄到海外地点，以便将货品转售为现金。

“They really caught me at the perfect time,” said Newton, 24, who was living with her parents in Birmingham, Alabama. “I was just one of those desperate people looking for a job.”

“他们真的在最佳时机抓住了我，” 24岁的牛顿说，她和她的父母住在阿拉巴马州的伯明翰。 “我只是那些绝望的人中的一员。”

Since the pandemic’s onset in March, the number of criminal schemes relying on money mules has spiked, just when many people have lost their jobs and are vulnerable to exploitation. The volume of schemes has been turbocharged partly by criminals going after enticing pots of money from the U.S. government — specifically, the benefit programs that were set up to help people and businesses hurt by the pandemic-induced economic downturn, authorities said.

自3月份大流行以来，依靠钱mu子的犯罪计划数量激增，正值许多人失业并容易受到剥削之时。 当局说，这些计划的一部分在一定程度上是由犯罪分子在诱使美国政府提供大量资金后进行的，特别是，旨在帮助人们和企业免受大流行性经济衰退伤害的福利计划。

In total, online human resources schemes where criminals pose as potential employers have soared 295% from a year ago, while schemes used for money laundering have skyrocketed by 609%, according to security firm ZeroFox.

根据安全公司ZeroFox的数据，总体上，犯罪分子构成潜在雇主的在线人力资源计划比一年前猛增了295％，而用于洗钱的计划却猛增了609％。

Many people who perpetrate these frauds are based overseas, authorities said, so they need to move the money to their home country. Banks and authorities have made it harder to launder money through traditional financial channels in recent years. So these criminals are now increasingly on the hunt for a larger supply of potential money mules just as many newly unemployed people look for work.

当局说，许多实施这些欺诈行为的人都在海外，因此他们需要将钱转移到自己的祖国。 近年来，银行和当局使通过传统金融渠道洗钱变得更加困难。 因此，正如许多新失业人员正在寻找工作一样，这些罪犯现在正在越来越多地寻找更多潜在的mu子。

“It is something that is escalating because of the current environment,” said Robert Villanueva, a former Secret Service agent who now works on cybercrime intelligence for the security firm Q6 Cyber. “It has become hard to avoid.”

“由于当前的环境，这种情况正在升级，”前特勤局特工罗伯特·比利亚努埃娃(Robert Villanueva)说，他现在在安全公司Q6 Cyber​​从事网络犯罪情报工作。 “很难避免。”

Money mules are not new, and their numbers have risen alongside online fraud more broadly over the last two decades. Some people enter the business knowing it is illegal. Advertisements looking for money mules on the so-called darknet, an anonymous corner of the internet popular with criminals, often acknowledge the illegal aspect of the work.

mu子并不是什么新鲜事物，在过去的二十年中，钱mu子的数量与在线欺诈行为相比有了更广泛的发展。 有些人在知道这是非法的情况下进入公司。 在所谓的“暗网”(darknet)上寻找广告mu子的广告经常受到犯罪分子的欢迎，这些暗网是犯罪分子在互联网上不为人知的一个角落。

“Hi. I need an excellent professional bank accounts loader for long term business,” read one ad from May, which was turned up by darknet research firm Flashpoint.

“嗨。 “我需要一个出色的专业银行帐户装订员来开展长期业务，” 5月读到的一则广告由Darknet研究公司Flashpoint提供。

Yet seven people who became money mules during the pandemic told The New York Times that they had no inkling of what their so-called employer was up to when they began the work. Many had recently lost their jobs and needed to pay the bills. To avoid exposure to the coronavirus, they were also looking for jobs to do from home, just what many swindlers want from a money mule.

然而，在大流行期间成为钱mu子的七个人告诉《纽约时报》，他们对开始工作时所谓的雇主所从事的工作一无所知。 许多人最近失业了，需要付账单。 为了避免暴露于冠状病毒，他们还在寻找在家工作的机会，这正是许多骗子想要从钱m子身上得到的东西。

Alma Sardas, 21, had been furloughed from her job at a hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, this spring when she saw a listing on jobs site ZipRecruiter advertising a work-from-home position as a “virtual assistant” to a businessman in Hong Kong.

今年春天，现年21岁的Alma Sardas在德克萨斯州沃思堡一家酒店的工作中休假，当时她看到工作网站ZipRecruiter上有一份广告，向在香港的商人宣传在家中担任“虚拟助手”的职位。Kong

Sardas sat through a formal interview and spoke with a man who called himself Hermann Ziegler, who said he would be her boss. Once she was hired, she was sent a check for $4,590 to deposit into her bank account. She was told to use some of the money for her expenses and to send the rest from her account to her new employer’s vendors.

萨达斯(Sardas)经过正式面试，并与一个自称为赫尔曼·齐格勒(Hermann Ziegler)的男人交谈，他说自己将是她的老板。 一旦被雇用，她就收到一张4,590美元的支票存入她的银行帐户。 她被告知要用其中的一些钱来支出，然后将剩余的钱从她的帐户中转给新雇主的卖方。

Sardas became skeptical about why the money would need to go through her bank account and called local police. They explained that she had almost been caught in a classic money-laundering scheme.

萨达斯开始怀疑为什么这笔钱需要通过她的银行帐户，并致电当地警察。 他们解释说，她几乎陷入了经典的洗钱计划。

“You make yourself so sincere and these people just take advantage of it,” she said, adding that she had shredded the check and reported the incident to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter said it removed the job posting immediately.

她说：“您让自己变得如此真诚，而这些人也只是利用它。”她补充说，她已将支票切碎并将事件报告给ZipRecruiter。 ZipRecruiter表示已立即删除该职位发布。

The schemes using money mules are varied. Some people who become mules are victims of online romance frauds who make bank and wire transfers for people they believe care about them. Others, like Sardas, are asked to use their own bank accounts to make financial transactions on behalf of their new employers. Newton became embroiled in what is known as a reshipping scheme, where the fraudsters buy goods with their stolen money and then use mules to get the products overseas, where they can be resold.

使用钱mu子的方案是多种多样的。 一些成为mu子的人是在线恋爱欺诈的受害者，他们为他们认为关心他们的人进行银行和电汇。 诸如Sardas之类的其他公司则被要求使用自己的银行帐户代表其新雇主进行金融交易。 牛顿卷入了一种所谓的“重新运输计划”，在该计划中，诈骗者用赃款购买商品，然后使用mu子将产品运往海外，然后可以将其转售。

Some of these operations have become well-oiled machines. William Zackery, 64, a substitute teacher in Northern California, began working with a company called SFP Shippers in May. SFP Shippers appeared to have multiple departments, a website and a custom online dashboard that he had to log in to each day.

其中一些操作已成为运转良好的机器。 今年64岁的William Zackery是北加州的代课老师，于5月开始与一家名为SFP Shippers的公司合作。 SFP托运人似乎有多个部门，一个网站和一个他每天必须登录的自定义在线仪表板。

Zackery, who was out of work, was enlisted to receive packages with expensive purses and cameras. It was his job to print new labels and ship the goods on to other places across the country. Many mule operations use multiple shipping legs to cover their tracks, security experts said.

失业的Zackery被邀请接收带有昂贵钱包和相机的包裹。 他的工作是打印新标签并将货物运输到全国其他地方。 安全专家说，许多m子行动使用多个运输支腿掩盖其航迹。

At first, he did not think anything was amiss. “I was getting calls two or three times a day from my so-called supervisors,” he said. But when the new employer stopped communicating, “I started doing some research that I should have done at the beginning.”

起初，他认为没有什么不妥。 他说：“我每天接到所谓的主管两次或三遍电话。” 但是当新雇主停止交流时，“我开始做一些我应该在一开始就要做的研究。”

Zackery ultimately reported SFP Shippers to local and national authorities; the company’s website has been taken down.

Zackery最终向地方和国家当局报告了SFP托运人。 该公司的网站已被删除。

Sometimes people’s identities are used without their knowledge. Over the past few months, Scattered Canary, a Nigerian criminal operation, submitted fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits in at least 14 states and then had the money delivered to accounts that they had set up, in the names of their victims, with Green Dot, a financial services company, according to security firm Agari.

有时，人们的身份是在他们不知情的情况下使用的。 在过去的几个月中，尼日利亚的犯罪行动分散金丝雀(Scattered Canary)在至少14个州提交了关于失业救济金的欺诈性要求，然后将这笔钱存入了他们以受害者的名义在绿点(Green Dot)开设的帐户中，据安全公司Agari称，这是一家金融服务公司。

Scattered Canary then sent the money overseas through Green Dot’s online system, all before the person whose name was used was alerted to the new account, the security firm said.

这家安全公司说，分散的金丝雀然后通过Green Dot的在线系统将钱寄到了国外，直到使用名字的人被告知新帐户。

Alison Lubert, a spokeswoman for Green Dot, said the company works “around the clock and invests heavily to identify, block and address fraudulent activity.”

Green Dot的发言人艾莉森·卢伯特(Alison Lubert)表示，该公司“全天候工作，并投入大量资金来识别，阻止和解决欺诈活动。”

Jamarle Worilds, chief of the illicit finance unit of Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said many people who act as money mules “don’t actually understand that they are operating in the space.” He said he had recently received text messages offering him the opportunity to work from home, which he easily spotted as an effort to recruit him as a money mule.

国土安全调查局非法金融部门负责人贾马尔·沃里兹(Jamarle Worilds)说，许多充当people子的人“实际上并不了解他们在太空中运作”。 他说，他最近收到短信，为他提供了在家工作的机会，他很容易发现这是为了招募他作为money子。

“I’m not sure about how they got my information, but that’s what it’s come to,” he said.

他说：“我不确定他们如何获得我的信息，但这就是它的意义。”

In Newton’s case, the woman from Heies who called identified herself as Carla Neely. She told Newton that the company needed “hub inspectors” to move packages for customers. Newton was pointed to a company website and went through an interview and a formal human resources process before being hired.

以牛顿为例，来自海伊斯(Heies)的那位妇女自称是卡拉尼利(Carla Neely)。 她告诉牛顿，该公司需要“枢纽检查员”为客户运送包裹。 牛顿被指到公司的网站，并在被录用之前经历了面试和正式的人力资源流程。

“Congratulations! We were impressed with your interview and would like to extend you a conditional offer for the position of Local Hub Inspector at Heies,” Neely wrote to Newton in her hiring letter.

“恭喜！ 您的采访给我们留下了深刻的印象，并希望向您提供有条件的Heies Local Hub Inspector职位，” Neely在求职信中写给Newton。

Apart from Apple Watches and laptops, Newton said, she was also sent odd items, including a pack of sponges and a garbage disposal.

牛顿说，除了苹果手表和笔记本电脑外，她还收到了一些奇怪的物品，包括一包海绵和垃圾。

By the time Newton reported Heies to the Better Business Bureau, the numbers and emails that the company had used were dead. Its website had also been taken down. The perpetrators, who have faced other online complaints, have not been caught.

到牛顿向商业改善局报告Heies时，该公司使用的电话号码和电子邮件已经失效。 它的网站也被删除了。 面临其他在线投诉的肇事者尚未被抓获。

“I feel scared that I have blood on my hands because I’m in the middle of a scam and I’m also in the middle of a pandemic,” Newton said. “They pretty much just took advantage of my vulnerability.”

牛顿说：“我害怕手上沾满鲜血，因为我处于骗局之中，而且也处于大流行之中。” “他们几乎只是利用了我的漏洞。”

For more great stories, subscribe to The New York Times.

欲了解更多精彩故事，请 订阅《纽约时报》 。

© 2020 New York Times News Service

©2020纽约时报新闻社