Money laundering spam: vacancy for Paypal account manager

Recently, I have seen a surge in spam email advertising an "agent" or "representative" for a company to collect money on its behalf and keep a percentage. A friend's daughter received the following email.

Dear Pamela [not her real name] I'm Linda Wilson, Manager of Royal Capital LTD company. On site Monster.com i have found your resume and want to offer you the vacancy of "PayPal Account Manager". Job description: The major duty of the PayPal Account Manager is to process payments between our clients and our company via PayPal system. You will get 15 percent per transfer. Salary: 500$-3500$ per month. Benefits of this vacancy:

1. Flexible work schedule, work 3-5 hours per week.
2. Possibility of your career rising.
3. Home-based.
4. Ability to take unlimited vacation (without guaranteed salary).

Minimal requirements:

1. You must have PayPal account with Verified bank account.
2. At least 18 years old.
3. Internet and Email skills.

If you need more information click here (http://royal-capital-ltd.biz/vacancies.php). If you want to apply for this job please fill the form (http://royal-capital-ltd.biz/get_job.php) If you’ve got some questions about this vacancy F.A.Q. (http://royal-capital-ltd.biz/faq.php) and can’t find the answer to them address to our support (http://royal-capital-ltd.biz/contact.php) . And we are sure to help you Best regards --- Linda Wilson manager@royal-capital-ltd.biz

It seems that these fraudsters are not the ordinary garden variety of advance fee fraud. They have gone through the trouble of setting up an elaborate web site which advertises the position Paypal account manager. The site is registered through a proxy in New Zealand (privacyprotect.org), and resolves to an IP address in Malaysia.The site claims they help people in countries that do not have Paypal:

Nowadays the world trade develops extremely fast and various international payment systems. They become more and more popular. Billions of people buy and sell something every minute. But unfortunately not all of them have ability to use PayPal services. PayPal payments is available not in all countries.We help people to process PayPal payments. Our main task is to help people from small countries (such as Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Ukraine, Philippines, Slovenia, Russia, Croatia) in receiving funds via PayPal. Our main office is located in Estonia, Kohta-Larve, Sqpruse 40a-1. And at the same time we increase number of our offices in other countries. At present time there are our offices in Latvia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Russia and Slovenia.

Incidentally, these are also countries with lax laws or corruption that makes prosecution of fraud difficult or impossible.They even have a documents section with a PDF employment agreement, and company registration.My guess is that this is a distributed money laundering scheme. Other hackers fool people into giving their Paypal account information via phishing or key loggers. If they transfer the money into one account, the activity will be suspicious. However, if they convince 1,000 innocent people to play middlemen, then it is less likely to be detected.