A frightening yet common scam is duping honest people looking for a way to make some extra money, and in some cases, making them unwitting accessories to crime.

Forbes gives a real-life example where a woman, Kelli Williams,  got an online job for listing products to be sold on eBay. 

A guy named “Bill” had a warehouse in California and wanted her to list items on eBay—under Williams’ account—and manage the transactions and inquiries. Bill would receive the order and ship the goods to the customers. “It all actually worked at first. I listed the items, the people received them, I got some money,” Williams said.

Then, she was hit with a barrage of complaints from customers who never received the items they purchased from her new boss.

 “As I took on more and larger items, complaints started rolling in. People weren't getting their items. They were demanding refunds. I kept pestering Bill and he would say the item was on its way. More emails, more demands for refunds. His next excuse was that they got lost in the mail (and he told me some ridiculous percentage of items get lost in the mail every day).”

But because the items were under Williams’ name and account, she was responsible for giving out refunds for increasingly expensive items, such as exercise equipment, electronics and software. “The last time I contacted Bill to essentially beg him to make this right, he became a totally different person (for all I know he could have been) and threatened me. He said he knew where I lived and worked and would send his ‘family in Chicago’ after me.”

She got out of the job and was never attacked, but she lost $5,000 in the process.

Brie Reynolds of FlexJobs.com advises, "Reshipping job scams aren't just annoying — they can actually involve job seekers in criminal activities. Most of the time, the goods being reshipped are stolen, and once a person receives those stolen goods and then mails them to another location, they've unwittingly become part of that crime."

These work-at-home, work-your-own hours jobs are tempting to young people, parents, and others looking for extra cash to pay bills, but their allure is exactly why scammers are posting fake job listings to sucker people in to becoming their criminal accomplices.

And these at-home scam jobs come in many flavors. They can involve data entry, rebate processing, product assembly, envelope stuffing, and more.

But they have one thing in common. They sound just a little too easy and convenient.

Other things to look for to keep yourself from becoming a victim are frequent errors in job listings and communications with potential employers, unprofessional forms of communication like chat messengers, too easy of a hiring process, being asked to use some of your own money (even temporarily) to complete assigned tasks, being required to give personal details like social security numbers and bank information to someone you’ve never met, and having a potential employer seem too eager to give you the job and not that interested in your qualifications.

Be smart, do your research, don’t rush into anything, and listen to your gut feeling if it’s telling you something is off.

Be safe! And share these tips with friends and family, especially young people new to the job market.