Outline
Email purporting to be from a firm called ‘HP Car Advertisement’ claims that you can earn $450 per week just by placing an ‘auto wrap’ advertising decal on your car and driving around as you normally do.
Brief Analysis
The email is a money laundering scam and is not from any genuine advertising company. The message is designed to trick you into accepting fake or stolen cheques and wiring a portion of the proceeds back to the criminals as cash.
Example
Hello,
We are currently seeking to employ in the USA How would you like to make money by simply driving your car advertising for HP.
How it works? Here’s the basic premise of the “paid to drive” concept: HP seeks people — regular citizens,professional drivers to go about their normal routine as they usually do, only with a small advert for “HP” plastered on your car. The advert are typically vinyl decals, also known as “auto wraps,”that almost seem to be painted on the vehicle, and which will cover any portion of your car’s exterior surface.
What does the company get out of this type of ad strategy? Lots of exposure and awareness. The auto wraps tend to be colorful, eye-catching and attract lots of attention. Plus, it’s a form of advertising with a captive audience,meaning people who are stuck in traffic can’t avoid seeing the wrapped car alongside them. This program will last for 12 months and the minimum you can participate is 1 month.
You will be compensated with $450 per week which is essentially a “rental”payment for letting our company use the space no fee is required from you HP shall provide experts that would handle the advert placing on your car. You will receive an up front payment of $450 inform of check via courier service for accepting to carry this advert on your car.
It is very easy and simple , no application fees required contact email along with the following if you are interested in these offer.
Full Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip code:
Age:
Occupation:
Make of car/ year:
Exterior Color of Car:
Telephone numbers:
Email:
We will contact you immediately we receive this information. Kind Regards!
© ®HP Car Advertisement. All rights reserved™.
Detailed Analysis
Email Offers To Pay You To Drive Around With Adverts on Your Car
At first glance, this emailed job offer, which purports to be from an outfit called ‘HP Car Advertisement’, may seem rather enticing. It claims that all you need do to earn $450 per week is place some advertising ‘autowraps’ on your vehicle and drive around in your normal way.
The email suggests that you can accept the offer by replying with your personal information and vehicle details. It adds that HP will then arrange to have experts come and place the advertising decals on your car. It promises that you will receive an initial payment via cheque after you accept the offer.
Email is a Money Laundering Scam
However, the email is not a genuine job offer. Instead, it is a scam designed to trick you into laundering fake or stolen cheques.
If you accept the offer by replying with your details, you will soon receive a cheque from the ‘company’, along with further instructions.
But, the cheque will be for considerably more than the promised initial payment of $450. The scammers will claim that the extra funds are to pay the ‘experts’ to come and install the advertising autowrap on your car. They will instruct you to first bank the check, and then, as soon as it clears, deduct your $450 fee and send the remainder via a wire transfer to the ‘autowrap experts’.
Alas, the extra funds will actually go right back to the scammers as cash. Meanwhile, the bank will discover that the cheque is stolen or fake. In this way, the criminals have turned the proceeds of dirty cheques into untraceable cash and can abscond with their ill-gotten gains.
And you will be left at the end of the money trail. You may be held responsible for processing the stolen cheque and face serious legal consequences when the police come knocking on your door. You may also be left out of pocket when the scam is discovered and the bank refuses to honour the cheque.
Of course, no carwrap experts will ever arrive and the supposed car advertising offer is entirely fictional.
Very Similar to Red Bull Car Advertising Scam
This scam is very similar to an earlier scam campaign that claimed that users could make money by placing Red Bull advertisements on their cars. Again, the offer was a money laundering scam and had no connection to Red Bull.
Another version of the same scam falsely claimed to be from Rockstar Energy Drink.
Be wary of any job offer that requires you to accept payments into your bank account, deduct your ‘wages’, and wire a remaining amount back to a third party. Such fake jobs are a very common criminal tactic to launder stolen funds.
Importance Notice
After considerable thought and with an ache in my heart, I have decided that the time has come to close down the Hoax-Slayer website.These days, the site does not generate enough revenue to cover expenses, and I do not have the financial resources to sustain it going forward.
Moreover, I now work long hours in a full-time and physically taxing job, so maintaining and managing the website and publishing new material has become difficult for me.
And finally, after 18 years of writing about scams and hoaxes, I feel that it is time for me to take my fingers off the keyboard and focus on other projects and pastimes.
When I first started Hoax-Slayer, I never dreamed that I would still be working on the project all these years later or that it would become such an important part of my life. It's been a fantastic and engaging experience and one that I will always treasure.
I hope that my work over the years has helped to make the Internet a little safer and thwarted the activities of at least a few scammers and malicious pranksters.
A Big Thank You
I would also like to thank all of those wonderful people who have supported the project by sharing information from the site, contributing examples of scams and hoaxes, offering suggestions, donating funds, or helping behind the scenes.I would especially like to thank David White for his tireless contribution to the Hoax-Slayer Facebook Page over many years. David's support has been invaluable, and I can not thank him enough.
Closing Date
Hoax-Slayer will still be around for a few weeks while I wind things down. The site will go offline on May 31, 2021. While I will not be publishing any new posts, you can still access existing material on the site until the date of closure.Thank you, one and all!
Brett Christensen,
Hoax-Slayer
