"They said, 'You seem to be the right person we are looking for and we would like you to work for us,'" said Sistla.
The company called itself EM service Company, based in London at 31 Leicester Square. He signed an employment contract and would get $3,000 a month. Soon the packages started arriving. Many of them were from computer companies containing electronics. He also got lots of emails with shipping labels. All he needed to do was slap them on the packages and send them out.
"All I would do was a lot of times open these packages and repack them into a single content if they came in multiple contents and took them to the post office," said Sistla.
But when he asked for his salary, the emails suddenly stopped. He became suspicious and asked his sister to check the company's address in London. 31 Leicester (Lester) Square is the address for the Radisson Edwardian Hampshire Hotel.
There was no shipping company on that address. These types of schemes are all too familiar to the FBI.
"The reshipping scheme, that tends to be people with stolen credit cards who are buying merchandise and having it sent to a certain address and then they're asking the person at that address to repackage it," explained Steven Goldman, FBI Fraud Investigator. "The internet has made it easier because you're allowed to operate from virtually anywhere in the world and conduct these scams."
Sistla still has one box in his apartment, an exhaust system. He reported all of this to the FBI.
"It is disappointing when people take advantage of others this way," said Sistal.
The FBI says if it sounds too good to be true it probably is and there are a lot of people out there trying to scam others during these tough economic times.
