My son's new remote job wants payments run through his own bank account. He says I'm being paranoid

#1tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)August 3, 2026, 11:47 am

My lad is 22, been looking for work since spring, and last week he got hired by an overseas company doing what he describes as "payment operations assistant". Fully remote, decent hourly rate, hired after two interviews conducted entirely in a chat app. No video, no phone call, which he says is normal now and I say is not normal at all.

Here is the bit I cannot get past. Part of the job is that clients send money into HIS personal bank account, he keeps a small percentage as his fee, and he forwards the rest on in smaller amounts to accounts they nominate, sometimes as crypto. They have called it processing customer refunds. He has already done one, about a week ago.

I told him this sounds like money laundering and he told me I am being paranoid and that I do not understand how modern companies operate. He is not a fool, he is genuinely delighted to have been picked after months of nothing, and I think that is half the problem.

How do I get through to him without turning it into a row where he digs in? Because at the minute every time I raise it he hears "you were too stupid to spot a scam".

#2Grace H(Joined Mar 2025 · 31 posts)August 3, 2026, 2:20 pm

You are not being paranoid. No legitimate employer anywhere routes company money through a junior employee's personal current account. That is not a modern practice, it is not a startup thing, it is not a cross border banking workaround. It does not happen.

The percentage he keeps is the giveaway. That is not a wage, it is a cut.

#3Walt F(Joined Jan 2026 · 17 posts)August 3, 2026, 4:52 pm

On the how rather than the what, because I have been the defensive one in a conversation like this.

Do not lead with laundering. The word makes a proud young man hear "criminal" and stop listening. Lead with the thing he actually has at risk, which is his own bank account and his own name, and ask questions instead of making statements. Where is the money coming from. Whose money is it. What happens if one of these clients turns out to be someone whose card was stolen. Let him find the hole himself, because a hole he finds is one he will believe.

#4Dana WhitakerFraud examiner(Joined Feb 2025 · 89 posts)August 4, 2026, 10:15 am

tomd52 said:

clients send money into HIS personal bank account, he keeps a small percentage as his fee, and he forwards the rest on

What you have described is the money mule recruitment pattern, and I would treat it as urgent rather than a difference of opinion to be settled over time. Your son is not the customer of this scam. He is the infrastructure.

Why they need him, in plain terms. Money stolen from other victims has to be moved out of the accounts it landed in before those victims report the theft and it gets frozen. Moving it directly is difficult, because banks watch for it. So a recruited person with a clean personal account, a real name, a real address and a real history is inserted in the middle. The funds arriving in his account are, in the overwhelming majority of these cases, other people's stolen money: someone's romance loss, someone's invoice fraud, someone's emptied savings. The percentage he keeps is his share of that, whether or not he understands it that way.

What that exposes him to, since this is the part that tends to land with people his age. Bank accounts get closed and flagged, and that flag can follow someone between institutions and make ordinary banking hard for years. There are criminal consequences in most jurisdictions for handling the proceeds of crime, and in many of them not knowing is a weaker defence than people assume, particularly once someone has been told and continues. And the victims whose money passed through are entitled to pursue it back, which points at the only named, traceable person in the chain, who is him.

The signals in what you wrote are all textbook, and it may help to lay them out for him as a list rather than a verdict: recruitment entirely through a chat app with no voice or video contact, a job whose actual function is receiving and forwarding money, payment as a percentage rather than a wage, onward transfers broken into smaller amounts, crypto as a leg of the chain, and an overseas employer with no verifiable premises or registration. Any one of those would warrant a hard look. Together they are the whole pattern. Job scams and the mule variant specifically are covered in job and employment scams.

On the practical side, because one transfer has already happened. He should stop immediately and forward nothing further, whatever pressure comes, including any claim that he now owes them the money or has broken a contract. He should keep every message, the job advert, the contract, and the transaction records rather than deleting them in embarrassment. Then he should contact his bank himself and tell them plainly what happened. People assume that call ends the account. It is far more often the thing that distinguishes a young person who was deceived and came forward from one who was found later, and banks do see this pattern constantly.

What I cannot do is advise him on his legal position, which depends on where he is and what has already moved. If any real sum has passed through, speaking to a qualified lawyer in his country is worth it, and it is worth doing before the next transfer, not after.

One thing for you, tomd52. The reason he is dug in is not stupidity, it is that being selected after months of rejection felt like being seen. Attacking the job attacks that. Aiming at the bank account instead, which he can lose next week, gets much further than aiming at the legality, which feels abstract to someone who has done nothing wrong in his own mind.

#5Priya V(Joined Apr 2026 · 14 posts)August 5, 2026, 7:38 pm

A friend of mine did nearly the same thing at university, "logistics coordinator", same forwarding arrangement. Her account was closed with no notice and she spent the best part of a year unable to open a normal one anywhere. Nothing further happened to her legally, but the banking part was miserable and long.

She said the worst moment was not the closure, it was reading later where the money had come from.

#6tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)August 6, 2026, 8:04 am

Thank you all. I did it Walt's way, questions not accusations, sat down with the actual list from Dana's post and went through it line by line without saying the word crime once.

He got to the bottom of the list and went very quiet, and then said "so the money that came in last week was somebody's". That was the whole conversation, really. Everything I had said for a fortnight did nothing and that one sentence out of his own mouth did all of it.

#7tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)August 28, 2026, 12:26 pm

Update three weeks on. He rang his bank himself, which I made him do rather than doing it for him, told them the lot. Account is under review and he has been given a basic one meanwhile, so it is inconvenient rather than catastrophic. Kept every screenshot. The "employer" sent increasingly threatening messages for about four days claiming he owed them a penalty, then went silent, which I gather is what they do.

He is back to job hunting and in a worse mood than before, and honestly I will take that. If anyone else is reading this with a son or daughter in the same spot, the account is the argument that works. Not the law, not your worry, the account.