If the following comes as a surprise to you, that’s okay. This is why Consumerist exists. Today, we’re here to remind you of the following: if someone e-mails you to offer a work-at-home job promising a nice middle-class income for only a few hours of work every week, it is probably a scam and you should run away.

Don’t snicker and say, “Everyone knows that,” because everyone quite clearly doesn’t know that. The experience of one Arizona woman shows why it’s probably a good idea to run a cursory Google search on a company before accepting a job with them.

Her mysterious new employer, Hybrid Logistic Systems, had found her resume on a job-hunting site and wanted to hire her for a position as a shipping agent, even though she had no job experience in the shipping industry or anything similar. “You’re going to be doing X, Y, and Z,’ and I thought, ‘I don’t have any of those skills listed on my resume’,” she recounted to local TV station KPHO. Still, this raised no flags, probably because the company said that they would train her for the work she’d be doing. Yay!

While she trained, she was told that she could do some early jobs and earn commissions. For example, they wanted her to link her personal checking account to the company’s business account. They would transfer over some money, which she would use to buy computers and ship them back to her employer. Of course, this is the entire scam, an advance fee fraud scheme. There was no job, and her task was to buy the computers before her bank figured out that the deposit was fraudulent.

Elaborate work-at-home schemes may be criminal enterprises [KPHO]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.