Nederland man caught in package shipping scam
Published 12:26 am Wednesday, December 29, 2021
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NEDERLAND — Police in Nederland are not currently looking to file criminal charges on a man who went to the UPS Store and picked up packages not belonging to him.
The man whom police said is in his 20’s and from Nederland ended up being the victim of a scam.
NPD was looking to identify the man on Dec. 14 and placed surveillance photos on their Facebook page, saying the man entered the store and gave the name of the victim who was receiving packages in the mail.
Assistant Chief Andy Arnold said the man, whose name was not given, was hired by a company to pick up packages and reship them.
“He thought he was working for a legitimate business,” Arnold said. “He went to pick these items up and ship them off to California. He was scammed, used as a tool for the scam unknowingly.”
NPD is now trying to track down the parent company to figure all that is part of the scam.
The only other time Arnold had heard of a similar scheme was in the early 2010s.
“We had an incident where somebody was sending items to a person’s house to be repackaged and shipped out, and the person thought they were working from home,” he said. “They were sending big items, like big cameras like Nikon, sending them to his house to be shipped off. We ended up tracing the person or the company.”
In the current incident, the man deemed a person of interest came forward and cooperated with police, he said.
And once they spoke with him “it all made sense.”
“We don’t want anybody else falling victim,” the veteran officer said. “He got scammed into doing something for somebody.”
The Nederland man came across the job while on the Internet looking for places to work from home.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Arnold said.