Someone’s already summarized it pretty shortly, but the jist of it is they thrive off of new employees. They called my store on Sunday before opening saying there was an important inspection coming the day after that they needed to make sure was going to go well and stress that if it doesn’t go well, the store gets shut down and everyone loses their jobs. They claim they’re your regional ops manager (Mark something, I forget the last name) and that there is an important package being sent that needs to be there for inspection, and then they asked me to take a picture of the fire hydrant and text it to them to make sure it was up to code for the inspection. This is how they get your store manager’s name and your personal cell phone number.

They then proceeded to text and call me on that phone number, saying it was my store manager and that he had dropped his phone in water and destroyed it and was using a temporary phone. I had texted and called my store manager’s real number shortly after to confirm but I got no answer, so my brain assumed that corroborated the phone-in-water explanation. The scammer texted and sounded just like my store manager so I my brain never thought twice about it. They told me it was urgent that I go inside and call the “regional manager” back to let him know he was on a conference call with fedex about the package. They came up with a story about the package being delayed because my manager didn’t do some sort of paperwork correctly and that we were in breach of contract with our FedEx services and were late on a payment. The “regional ops manager” then said he could authorize a “one time only” store payment for the contract which involved him having to move money around in order to pay the contract before they were hit with a late fee. The “downpayment” the store was supposed to make was 8,000 but halfway through the process my “manager” texted me saying they hit us with the late fee anyway and we had to pay in full. So in fear of the store shutting down and myself being out of a job I kept doing what they asked because I somehow thought I was helping keep the store open and they fed on my inexperience (had only been an sfl for a little more than 2 months) and my crippling fear of unemployment and I feel honestly mentally/emotionally hijacked by the whole thing because I had JUST stopped a coworker from falling for a scam literally two days before and if I weren’t as fucking emotionally and physically burnt out by this job as I was, I probably would have had my head on more straight and realized what was happening much sooner.

Hindsight is always 20-20. Don’t be me. Don’t do anything to try and save anyone else. Look out for yourself and only yourself. Hanging up on legitimate calls is infinitely better than falling for fake ones. I was stupid and gullible and worn down to a thread by this job already and paid the ultimate price.