Complaint Review: Vobis.pl - Internet

At the end of July I received an email from company vobis.pl, advertising online work as a corrector for texts. The text contained no formatting, pictures, or official company graphics, but when I googled Vobis.pl, a Polish auctioning website (like Ebay) came up. So it seemed legit, and I was looking for online work, so I emailed back with my interest. They replied with details about the position: I would be correcting messages to customers, website content, and other text; I would receive $5 for each KB of text and would be paid monthly; all payments would be received through PayPal. Again, there was no formatting or official company content, and the text had some errors, as would be expected from someone who speaks English as a second language.

Shortly after, I started receiving emails with the texts to be corrected, and they all seemed legit: some were replies to customers about order questions, others were messages to representatives explaining how to process payments. I would correct the text and respond within a day. Afterwards, they would reply with how much money I had currently earned. Also, I usually sent my emails in the evening (Eastern time), and they would reply early morning the next day (anywhere from 1  to 6 am), which seemed to correspond with the company being six hours ahead in European time.

After correcting about 5 texts (so about 5 days later), they emailed me saying they no longer had need for text correctors, but were looking for representatives (alot of their texts which I corrected were messages to "current" representatives, fictitiously replying to requests about hiring friends and family of the representatives as new representatives). The person emailing me claimed that as a Polish company, Vobis cannot receive above a certain amount in PayPal transactions, and thus hired US representatives to use their PayPal accounts to process payments. After providing my PayPal email, Vobis was supposed to give it to customers purchasing items, and they would submit payment to my account. I was then supposed to withdraw the payment as cash and ship via UPS to an address which they would provide after I received my first payment. An agent would then convert the money to bitcoins, which is how the money would be transferred to Poland or wherever. As a representative, I would receive a 5% commission from each transaction, along with a starting monthly salary of $1500.

When I agreed to work as a representative, I was instructed to await a phone call from the number listed with this company in my report, and someone would give me final instructions. I was even sent an email before telling me to report on the phone call afterwards, to ensure the person asked and answered certain questions. I received the call, and the person (their voice sounded male) gave me very brief instructions which had mostly been stipulated already in emails. I asked some questions, but the person seemed rather curt and abrupt; at the time, it seemed to me that perhaps he was nervous or uncomfortable. I waited for about a month with very little correspondence from Vobis. They said I was supposed to start receiving payments within 7 or 8 days after starting as representative. When I emailed them several weeks later, they just told me to keep waiting. I was confused, because I clearly hadn't received payments withing the timeline they suggested, but if it was a scam, I wasn't sure how they had a benefitted; they only had my PayPal email and my work email address, along with my cell number and my name, and I periodically verified all my bank accounts and PayPal to ensure there were no unidentifiable transactions or withdrawals.

Just yesterday I received my first payment to my PayPal account, in the amount of $6774.99, for what appears to be an aviation GPS. The payment came from Ebay, and there was a message saying the fund would be available withing 21 days, unless I provided shipping info on Ebay first. Vobis hadn't mentioned anything about the payments coming from Ebay, so I sent them an email asking for clarification, but was also suspicious, so I did some more research and found another Ripoff Report about Vobis. Just search Vobis on this website and it should show up. Most of the information reported there is exactly identical to what I have experienced. So I searched the Ebay buyer shown with the PayPal transaction, and they seem to be an actual legit buyer with a legit company. I quickly issued a full refund of the payment amount to the buyer through PayPal, and sent the email address provided (which I was able to also find on the company's website) a message about the situation. The buyer shortly replied back, thanking me and stating they suspected it was a scam. I'm still waiting to hear back from Vobis.

Looking back now, I think the person behind this scam put alot of thought, time, and effort into creating an elaborate scheme to trick people. There seems to be an actual legit website for the company which they created (still don't know if it is or not), they never asked for money and actually were offering money. They started with a seemingly innocent request: just correcting texts, and they provided actual texts to back up the idea of some online auctioning company. After giving the victim time to gain trust in Vobis through prompt replies and encouraging praise of work completed, they offer the position of being a representative, which offers even more money! Again, some of the texts I corrected were addressing "current representatives" and made the position seem legit and financially promising. Turns out they might be tricking people into unkonwingly receiving and processing payment for stolen items or just fraudulent payments to begin with.

As discussed in the other Ripoff report about this company, I'm now going to have to shut down my current PayPal account, and probably the email account associated with my PayPal as well.