unless its your very close friend or family, don't launder money. i think this is a life lesson we learn in middle school and grow up to think adults are more trustworthy
* The scammer keeps the focus on the upsides (job, office supplies) which are good but not unrealistic.
* The scammer is keeping the victim overwhelmed with interviews, paperwork, training, etc. The actual scam part is a small percentage of the victim's focus. This is classic misdirection.
* The scammer gets the victim to commit a lot of time and energy. Loss aversion and social norms stops people calling out slightly suspicious activity immediately.
* The big one is that the scammer drip feeds pieces so that the victim doesn't see the big picture. It's not like the scammer lays out the scheme on day one. They start with the company providing supplies (not suspicious), bureaucratic fumbling meaning the process changes (understandable), the new hire submitting the order themselves (ok), etc. Each step is logical and only slightly peculiar in isolation. Once the victim is comfortable with each step they are fed the next lie.
The last one works because even if people are suspicious of new information, once they've decided something is true they rarely reconsider their position. In this case the scammer got the victim to believe that the job was real, and the scammer was a legitimate HR person before introducing the scam element. If you believe the company is real, why would you imagine the check is fake? If you truly believe the check is real, how does the transfer risk your own money? They build a foundation of trust by layering a lot of little lies.
For example, when I company I worked for sent me on a business trip, I was supposed to buy the flight ticket using my own money, then bring them then receipt, and then they would pay me the money back. Why couldn't they buy the flight ticket themselves instead? They knew when and where I am traveling; they were the ones deciding that. It would be easier for one HR person to buy 5 tickets at once whenever one of the teams went to a business trip, than for 5 developers to buy the tickets individually and figure out the rules.
This totally felt like a scam (use your own money to buy something we want to buy, and you only have our word that will get the money later back), except it didn't make sense, because it was a large international company employing thousands of people, and I have already worked there for months. And yes, it was perfectly legit. Just needlessly complicated and weird.
So the fact that a company does something weird and needlessly complicated doesn't necessarily make it a scam. It's just likely a scam when they do it before paying you the first salary.
I suspect with a small firm that doesn't necessarily have a dedicated travel "guy" it probably simplifies things letting people book their own flights.
For some people, airline choice is a big deal. For some cities, you might even pick the wrong airport (i. e. if the person has an easier commute to Newark or Laguardia than JFK). Not to mention scheduling (maybe someone wants to travel the "day before" because of risk of too-tight scheduling).
OTOH, maybe it's simpler for "local team all in one city" versus "remote workers being herded to a single event".
For one thing even if the company never reimbursed you - it wasn’t an outright scam, you did get a flight. The scam scenario you are literally just sending money to a scammer - with the extra flourish of getting a fake check.
What you say about expensing is not unusual and there a number of reasons for it. It does offload the onus of correctly making reservations, putting in KTIN and immigration info on you. And then the big one is that I get all the travel card benefits (points). I even prefer it this way.
a) you’re buying tickets for someone else
b) that scam company also owns the airline (or if you’re buying from a third part online agency)
Otherwise how could you get scammed? Haha we tricked you into going to Atlanta but didn’t monetarily benefit from it at all!
Sorry, what middle school child learned that? None that I know.
This was before the internet was really a thing, too, so the same basic scam has been around for a long long time.
