The latest batch of scam alerts from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) came out yesterday, and there are some interesting things going on out there.

I won’t past the entire text here, but the “Triangle Credit Card Fraud” was a new one to me. It works this way:

The first party is the fraudster who acts as a seller on a popular auction or marketplace site. The fraudster “sells” a product to the second party, the buyer that knows nothing about the scam. The buyer pays the seller for the product or service. The seller then needs to deliver the product or service to the buyer and does so by placing an order with the manufacturer of the product or service to the buyer and does so by placing an order with the manufacturer of the product or service, the third party. That order will contain the buyer’s information for shipping and stolen credit card information for billing. When the company receives the order, the billing and shipping information is all legitimate, thus it looks like an order being placed as a gift, so the company delivers the product or service.

That’s a big ball of text that takes a minute to decipher (and it seems to repeat itself at least once, but the underlying message is clear: you have to be really, really cautious when buying things from online auction sites.

The alerts also point out a new take on the old work-at-home scheme. This time, crooks are telling victims they submitted a resume online and using the names of well-known financial institutions and agencies (instead of the usual out-of-the-blue offer for mystery shopper work), then sending victims a fraudulent cashier’s check to purchase software or other supplies. Naturally, the victim then wires back the overage and ends up losing money. This time they’re finding victims because a vast number of people have been submitting resumes online, and I can tell you from experience: unless you’re a record-keeping ninja, it can get hard to keep track of what jobs you’ve applied for.