Defrauded online

"Do you want to earn Tk 20,000 per month working from home for only two hours a day?"

This is a common catchphrase in job offers for young women cropping up on Facebook, especially for those who are part of various groups formed by and for young women on the social media site.

Such seemingly lucrative job offers often generate significant interest among young women looking for a job they can do from home, unaware that these are posted by fraudulent groups to siphon off a small amount of money each from a large number of people.

Interested in one such job offer, 20-year-old undergraduate student in Dhaka, Samira Jannat, posted from another Facebook account she had under the name "Adiba Noor", asking for a job description.

Almost instantly, she got a reply that said to secure the job she needs to pay Tk 60 through a mobile banking account number, as an "add fee", after which she will be added to a training group on Facebook Messenger.

Samira's key responsibilities would be writing and submitting a paragraph per day, for which she would receive a monthly salary of Tk 20,000. They would be on a wide range of topics -- like describing a winter's morning or the feel of a village market, the kind of thing you were assigned to write on for English class at school.

Sounds preposterously easy, but there was a catch.

Besides, she was messaged, if she could recruit more job seekers like herself to the Messenger group, she would receive half the "add fee" as commission. She would also be entitled to a Tk 100 bonus if she was able to add 30 or more job-seekers.

After paying the ad fee, Samira was added to "Training Group-18", where on an average 30 girls were added every day. She was also added to a "submit group", where she was told to submit her daily paragraph.

Samira was also warned not to ask anyone else in the training group anything and if she had any questions, to directly message the person who had added her to the group. Otherwise, she was told, the group admin would remove her from the group and she would lose her "job".

"After a few days, although everyone started submitting paragraphs every day, I realised the admin was not interested in what we were writing. I don't think they even saw what we submitted," she said.

Rather, the group admin kept pressuring everyone to add more people to the group by posting the job offer in other women's groups they were part of and collecting "add fees" from them, she said.

"Soon, I realised something fishy was going on. I saw the number of recruited persons become more than 250 in a few days and I was wondering how they would pay the promised salary to 250 people, which would be more than Tk 50 lakh a month," Samira said.

Her suspicions were soon confirmed when the admin started removing everyone from the group who, like her, had been in the group for more than 20 days at that point and asked about their payment.

Afterwards, Samira searched but could not find the Facebook profiles of either the group admin or the person who recruited her -- she figured she was either blocked or they had deactivated their accounts.

When she called the mobile number where she had been sending the fees of those she recruited, she found she had also been blocked from that number.

Samira's account suggests that these group admins and the people behind the scheme -- if we count 250 members each in 20 groups who had sent them at least Tk 30 -- an estimated amount of Tk 1.5 lakh in two to three weeks, without investing a single taka. 

To investigate further, this correspondent also replied to one such job offer and was added to "Training group-38" with more than 200 members at that point, in exchange for a Tk 300 fee.

If an average 200 people each in 40 such groups had sent half the fee to their respective group admin's mobile banking account, the group admins have already received an amount of Tk 12 lakh in just a few weeks, by hoodwinking gullible young job seekers.

This correspondent spoke to 50 young women, mostly homemakers and students -- including some young men -- who were cheated by these scams. Technically resembling pyramid schemes, the members were forced to reel others into the Messenger groups in exchange for a fee ranging from Tk 60-500, half of which they got to keep.

The tasks ranged from placing a given code number on images of clothes or selling clothes in girls' groups to writing paragraphs. But none of these lasted a whole month -- all the members being removed from the groups at around the 20-day mark.

NEW TWIST, OLD SCAM

In 2013, the government banned pyramid marketing by passing the Multilevel Marketing (MLM) Activities (control) Ordinance 2013.

The law was introduced after several scams like Destiny 2000, Unipay2u and ITCL were busted, which had been embezzling vast amounts of money from clients by selling non-existent products and services.

The scams these young people are encountering on Facebook are structured like the now-banned pyramid schemes, albeit on a smaller scale but with a new twist -- going online -- said experts.

Co-founder of Bangladesh Cyber & Legal Centre Gazi Mahfuz Ul Kabir informed this correspondent that they had encountered around 150 victims of such cyber scams and received around eight complaints.

AFM Al Kibria, deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police's Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit, said they have also received a number of complaints related to such scams based on Facebook Messenger groups.

The CTTC has also received two cases on this. "After our investigation, we found they are basically frauds, having no business," he said.

"We even arrested two criminals who embezzled more than Tk 50 lakh, by adding people to their Messenger group, and seized around Tk 6 lakh from them," Kibria added.

According to Kibria, since the amount is small, victims don't want to complain, leading these frauds to continue their schemes online.

"The victims can come to us if they want to make a complaint against such Facebook fraud. Because if they don't report, it becomes difficult for us to take action since these happen in 'closed' groups on Facebook." 

According to Facebook community standards, it has policies to prevent and disrupt fraudulent activities and removes content aimed at deceiving people deliberately. This includes users not posting content on false recruitment and ponzi or pyramid schemes, confidence schemes, or setting up false businesses or entities.