One of the rising work at home scams nowadays is what is called “repackaging or reshipping scams.”

The modus operandi works like this: you may receive an unsolicited email or see a post on Craigslist or a job board telling you that you can get paid for acting as a middleman where your job is to accept goods and send them to a given address. Or you will sell items they will supply on eBay and will accept payment for them. These criminals are often based in the former Soviet bloc countries, with many coming from Russia.

Sounds easy right? More so when you hear that you can get paid around $20-$40 for every package processed and sent!

Alas, many are finding that these are but scams. Worse, there have been reports that some people get jailed for it. MSNBC.com reports that a man was nearly jailed for this “job” because he was accepting goods apparently purchased with stolen credit cards.

In one case, a woman was sued for selling a Russian antique jewelry box on eBay because the item never arrived after the buyer sent her several thousands of dollars for the winning bid. The middleman said that she wired the money to her Russian bosses after receiving word that the item will be sent as soon as the money is received. But no antique jewelry box came, and the Russian who hired her through a job board posting disappeared. Unfortunately for the middleman, the buyer went after her. She accepted the job because she was in desperate need of cash, and was not expecting that the “job” will end up in court.

Read the warning issued by the United States Postal Service about this reshipping scam

Remember the cardinal rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.