NuStar Group Holdings LLC

Victim Location 33433

Type of a scam Employment

I received a message on Upworks.com (which is a freelance employment website) that I was selected for an online interview for a remote admin assistant position. I was contacted by Kerry Pearson, who referred me to add [email protected] on google hangouts so we could conduct an interview via instant message.

After I "got the job" they had me fill out an employment agreement with the company logo and nondisclosure contact. They then assigned me to an "online supervisor" named Mary Rose Brown ([email protected]). She explained elaborately all of the details of the "job" and even sent me training tasks daily. The tasks were things like "draft a cash book for the following transactions", and "prepare a bank reconciliation based on these pending items".

Then, they sent me a check and asked that I do a deposit into a "vendor account" so that they can "send me equipment to have an at-home mini-office". The account information i was provided had a foreign name. I asked why they didn’t just send the equipment directly to me and they said it was because "Nustar wanted me to be the primary beneficiary and owner of the equipment for legal reasons". I requested to videochat so I could confirm her identity. She claimed that her "desktop wasn’t compatible for that".

Finally, I called Nustar’s HR contact on their official website and asked them to confirm that Mary Rose Brown was an employee with them. The HR contact stated that they had heard of this scam before, and they had even shut it down in the past but the scammers continued to do it under a different name. She continued to say that Nustar does not hire remotely and that any employment opportunities would be sent from an email that ended in @nustar, not @gmail.