The letter warned the recipient that she still hadn't responded to that great offer from "US Airlines" of two free airline tickets, and time was running out. Call the toll-free number now! it urged.

Fortunately, Red Tape reader Mary McNamara ignored it and passed it on to me. But somebody must be calling the enclosed toll free number, because the "great airline ticket giveaway" just won't go away. Complaints about it can be found across the web from a couple of days ago, and from at least two years ago.

---

Let's take care of the basics first. There is no airline called "US Airlines" -- you're thinking of U.S. Airways. That’s no accident; that’s a technique. A variation of the letter is from "American Airways," a bastardized version of American Airlines. Call the number, and you don't get two free airline tickets; you get invited to a 90-minute presentation where you will be encouraged to join a travel club.

 

In the words of travel expert and consumer advocate Chris Elliot: "I have yet to find a travel club that is legitimate."

I called the toll free number and was told I had to travel from Seattle to Portland to attend a meeting before I could receive my free tickets. But the operator, who identified himself as Josh, gave me the option of calling a friend or relative in the Chicago area and sending that person on my behalf to a meeting there. Thanks to their generous referral program, he said, I'd get free tickets just for talking a (soon to be former) friend into attending.

To save yourself the trouble of calling and listening to the pitch, someone recorded their call and posted it on YouTube.

Elliot, by the way, also received one of these free airline ticket letters recently, and wrote about it on his blog.

The free ticket letter offering has been around for at least two years, and inspired a lot of complaints in April 2011. It is such a nuisance that U.S. Airways had to post a "scam alert" on its website.

A representative to the airline told me that she's worked in the company's public relations department for seven years, and the free ticket letter "just kind of resurfaces from time to time." She reiterated, with a heavy sigh, that the airline was in no way affiliated with the offer.

Why would such an offer persist for years, despite all the warnings about it?

"People don't pay attention to details," said Elliot, also the author of the book, “Scammed.”  "US Airlines could exist, and the victims are quickly seduced by the offer. In other words, this thing is still around because it works."

When I asked "Josh" for more details, he said he was working for a company named Universal Travel Deals. The point of the 90-minute meeting -- he called it a "meet and greet" -- was to drum up business for local travel agencies, he said.

"Hopefully, to get people to book travel through them, rather than through those websites, like Travelocity or Expedia," Josh said. 

There are also complaints about Universal Travel Deals in various consumer sites online. When I called the number for a firm named Universal Travel Deals in a Chicago suburb called Tinley Park, a woman who answered confirmed her company was managing free airline ticket offers. When I said I was a reporter, she took my name and number and said she'd have someone return my call. I’m still waiting.

Elliot said he's seen various telephone numbers come and go for the offer, which is a sign that something is wrong.

"The numbers have changed, which suggests to me that they may be moving from state to state," he said. "That's a common tactic to stay a step ahead of state regulators. My guess is this isn't a big enough fish for the Feds to get involved. Either that, or the FTC hasn't received enough complaints about it."

Do letter recipients ever end up with free airline ticket vouchers? That’s unclear, but this much is certain: nothing is really free in this world, and certainly not airline tickets. Letter recipients never get anything just by calling. They have to attend sales meetings, which, according to the few stories posted online by people who claim they’ve attended, exact their own costs.

If you receive an offer like this, please do three things.

1) Read it carefully. It's good practice to find the misleading elements, such as names like "US Airlines."

2) Throw it out and ignore it

3) Complain to your state attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission so someone actually takes a close look what's going on. (Here's a handy contact list for state attorneys general).

*Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook.
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Gina Walker is a struggling 23-year-old mother of two living in Bay St. Louis, Miss., an area still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Her husband wakes up at 3 a.m. every day to work at nearby Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, and gets home 12 hours later.  So to help ease her husband's burden, she did something about 65 million Americans are doing every month, according to comScore Media Metrix – she turned to an online job listing site.

While that led to several work-from-home jobs, it also put her squarely in the sights of online crooks running an international con -- a con that every online job seeker should know about.

In Walker's case, she placed a "work wanted" ad at Odesk.com, which helped her find part-time, work-at-home jobs to supplement her husband's income. Typically, she requests $7.78 an hour for remote data entry, virtual assistant work, or customer service.

So it wasn't unusual in April when a man calling himself Justin Hugh Jones contacted her and asked her to be his virtual assistant. Jones said he was doing work for an international fashion marketing firm named Mandi Lennard.

"You are what we'll call our virtual boss," said the man, who called himself dhugh91 in a chat room, according to a transcript provided by Walker. He then described a set of duties meant to make life easier for models and other vendors who travel frequently around the globe.

---

The headline unemployment in Mississippi is 10.7, even worse than the national rate of 9.7 -- so Walker wasn't about to ignore the opportunity.  Still, she had a couple of questions.

First, the man from the marketing firm contacted her directly -- not through the ODesk.com system.  And second, she was curious about her actual day-to-day work. Jones (dhugh91 in this transcript) was very interested in her printer, and gave her specific instructions to buy special ink and paper.

dhugh91: like I said you'll need to get some supplies from office max

dhugh91: you said there is one close by

ginawalker911: Yes office max and office depotd

hugh91: let me give you links to the supply

dhugh91: here is a link to the universal ink that you'll need

ginawalker911: okay

dhugh91: check it out and let me know

ginawalker911: okay

dhugh91: whats your printer's model

{...}

dhugh91: Now here is the check paper

ginawalker911: Okay

Walker had some initial misgivings, and discussed the job at length with her husband.  But she was impressed when she did some research on Mandi Lennard.  In the end, she accepted.

Jones' initial requests were small.  A few days after she "got the job," he asked her for help keeping a French photographer happy.

dhugh91: We just got a request from our contact in South Africa

ginawalker911: Okay

dhugh91: One of the French photographer requested we got him some Alcohol

dhugh91: for his mini launch

dhugh91: Its called NUVO

ginawalker911: Oh okay

dhugh91: i found some online

dhugh91: so i was wondering if we could send you the funds

dhugh91: and you'll use your credit card in buying them

dhugh91: once you get them

dhugh91: you can now send it to them in South Africa via DHL

ginawalker911: Okay, is there any particular reason why you would like me to send them?

ginawalker911: I don't mind just curious.

dhugh91: No reason

dhugh91: just because i am very busy

dhugh91: and you are my assitant

Then, she received a $50 payment via MoneyGram to pay for the printer supplies.  The money arrived without incident, leading Walker to believe that Jones was legitimate.

Soon, the requests turned to money.  She was told to visit a local Wal-mart and receive funds at a MoneyGram location, then wire that money using a nearby Western Union kiosk.  She was instructed to perform four such transfers in short order, and to keep 10 percent of each transaction to cover her costs. The money arrived from U.S. cities like Atlanta, but she was instructed to send it to a city in South Africa, to a man named Taofeek Olalere.

Then, on May 6, Jones told her to print out a check for $1,300, deposit the money into her own account,  and then draw a check off her account and mail it to Taofeek Olalere.

Walker hit a snag, however, when she deposited the money. Her bank told her the funds would be held for seven days, pending a check for fraud.

'There would be felony charges'
A few days later, she received a phone call an irate woman in Atlanta. The initial check was drawn on her account, she said, and when she called the bank to complain a representative gave her Walker's contact information.

"She never heard of this person and never authorized any such check. She said she was contacting the police and there would be felony charges brought against me," a frantic Walker wrote to msnbc.com on May 23. "I don't know what is going to happen and am really scared. I have never been in trouble before, I have no record at all, not even a speeding ticket. I am afraid of going to jail, I have two little girls to take care of, they depend on me."

Walker was caught up in a relatively common "money mule" scheme.  Overseas criminals who steal credit card and bank account information have one serious hurdle to overcome before they can make their easy money -- they have to figure out a way to move cash from a U.S. account to an overseas account without raising suspicion.  They often do this by involving an unwitting middle man, or money mule, and passing the money through his or her hecking account.  It's far less suspicious for Walker to send a $1,200 check to Africa than for a criminal with an African Internet address to request online payment through a bank Web site.

There's nothing new about Internet-based money mule scams -- they've been around for at least 10 years. What's new is a persistent national unemployment rate that's been hovering near double-digits for the past year.

Tabatha Marshall tracks such online scams at a Web site named PhishBucket.org, which is devoted to stopping online employment fraud.  She's seen the scams grow more sophisticated and the cover stories more believable, even as the ranks of the unemployed grow more desperate.

"I think of Phishbucket as a barometer of what's going on, and it's getting exponentially worse," she said.  Typically, money mules invoke the name of a trusted brand such as Mandi Lennard to give their proposals an air of legitimacy.  Her site now catalogs this kind of "brand identity theft" against 2,185 companies. "And I have 2,000 unread e-mails in my inbox I still have to go through," she added.

Online job seekers are particularly vulnerable because they are obliged to publish their e-mail addresses and other personal information about themselves in order to be attractive to prospective employers. That gives scammers plenty of material to work with ("I see you live in Oregon and you're looking to get into the fashion industry. ... We might be a great match!")  And e-mail filters or other tools that might help identify scams are useless against many job scam solicitations precisely because virtual job seekers are constantly scanning their inbox -- or even their junk mail folder -- for that one piece of e-mail that might bring good news.

At ODesk, scammers must be a bit more persistent. Users can't see each other's personal information until they "agree to an interview" with each other, according to company spokeswoman Erica Benton.  Still, as Walker's case demonstrates, that's hardly an insurmountable hurdle. She believes the scammer got her information after she responded to an ad for a customer service assistant.

Marshall is a member of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a banking industry trade group that works to fight Web fraud.  In a report she prepared for the group(pdf) last fall, she revealed that money mule scams had more than tripled from 2007 to 2009.  Meanwhile, other frauds, such as pyramid schemes, reshipping scams or online auction fraud, had remained relatively flat.

Law enforcement authorities have taken notice.  The FBI issued a warning about increased money mule activity in November.

Still, that warning was little help to Walker, who was more focused on helping her husband keep food on the table than evaluating global fraud trends.

She spent a couple of hours on the phone with the victim whose checking account funded the fraudulent transfer, and shared all her notes and chat logs.

"She was understanding," Walker said. "I sent her everything right while I was on the phone with her."

She no longer fears prosecution, and Jones has disappeared into the vacuum of the Internet.  She figures the episode cost her about $500, despite the "commission" payments.  The bad check caused her account to be overdrawn, and she was forced to pay about $150 in overdraft charges. She's also out money she spent on a new printer and other supplies Jones directed her to buy.

Now she's back to looking for $7.78-per-hour data entry jobs online, but with a renewed sense of caution about virtual job hunting.

"It's just important that you do a lot of research before you sign up with anyone," she said. "Make sure you check them out."

RED TAPE WRESTLING TIPS
ODesk offered three tips for online job seekers:
* Never pay up front for the privilege of working
* Never go outside the system to arrange for payment (this is similar to advice that eBay gives its users)
* If possible, avoid giving personal information

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VANCOUVER -- "I NEED TICKETS" screamed the signs hanging from the necks of the scalpers, in the style of a homeless person asking for a handout or a hitchhiker looking for a ride to Manitoba.  They meandered in and out of the crowd in Vancouver's Robson Square, the center of Olympic fan activities in the host city.

You've seen this scene before, but its overtness – taking place right outside the official ticket pickup location -- was striking.  Scalping must be legal in Canada, eh?

I love ticket scalpers. As people they are often slimier than moss-covered rocks.  But as a student of markets and consumer behavior, they provide me with endless hours of amusement. Ticket scalping is one of the purest forms of a true marketplace you'll ever find -- buyers and sellers negotiating under extreme time pressure, both saddled with limited information and high risks, bidding on a commodity that is both perishable and scarce.  Fifteen minutes before game time, this market is extremely efficient.

---

Event holders hate scalpers, of course. They say they are trying to protect consumers from fraud. Counterfeits happen, as do lies about seat location, but given the complete anonymity of the transactions, I'm constantly amazed at the relative lack of fraud in scalping.  While related, scalping (a secondary ticket market) and fraud (counterfeit tickets) are really different problems.  In reality, I think promoters are just jealous. When scalpers sell tickets at well above face value, they embarrass promoters by revealing that the tickets were underpriced.

Naturally, the more amateurish the ticket buyers, and the more professional the sellers, the more money the scalpers make. And the more anonymous the transaction -- say, the more distance between hometowns of buyer and seller -- the easier it is to run a scam.

That brings us to the subject of Olympic ticket sales, which create ideal conditions for all manner of scams and overpricing.  The Olympics arrive only every four years and often play out in small venues, making tickets scarce and valuable. Buyers invest an outrageous amount of money and time just to get to the scene. If they come without tickets, the pressure to get some is immense.  So they usually come hat in hand to scalpers.  Moreover, would-be scammers who sell for local baseball or football games have at least a small chance of seeing their victims in the future. Olympian scams pose almost no risk to the criminal, who will probably be half a world away by the time the ruse is exposed.

Perhaps the largest Olympic ticket scam in history occurred two years ago. During the Beijing games, dozens of Olympic athlete families were scammed by a Web site, estimated to have stolen millions of dollars from would-be fans.

The Vancouver Olympic Committee set out to prevent a similar debacle, using the only trick that such agencies ever consider: making money off scalping. In Vancouver, neither scalping nor exchanging tickets is allowed. Resold tickets can be "deactivated" and made invalid for events, the Olympic committee warns. It says anyone who wants to sell tickets must use the "fan-to-fan" Internet marketplace set up by the Olympic committee. The good news: tickets are relatively easy to find. The bad news: the agency makes 10 percent off both the sale and the purchase of the tickets. Even worse: High demand tickets are being sold eBay auction style. This week, opening bids for tickets to the "preliminary round" Canada-U.S. hockey game were listed as high as $10,000 -- not including the $1,000 "marketplace" fee.

So how is state-sponsored scalping doing at tamping down illicit sales? I went to Vancouver without event tickets to have a look. Knowing about the ticket troubles in Beijing, I fully expected the organized Canadians to have beaten down the business. Far from it.

'Relaxed about things'
Placard-wearing sellers were easily found, yelling like carnival barkers at the crowd, just above the child skating rink and popular free rip-cord line set up for the Games revelers. Within earshot -- heck, close enough for a body check -- were uniformed sheriff's officers (provincial law enforcement) ignoring the activity. Tickets were going for double their face value, more in some cases. The scalpers showed no fear of law enforcement. It was easy to spot the ringleader, going from seller to seller, whispering something in their ears every few minutes.

Vancouver -- a city where people say "I'm sorry" for passing you on the sidewalk -- is trying its darnedest to be friendly for the World.  Volunteers in blue jackets that say "Ask me" are everywhere. So I asked. Is scalping legal?

"No. But you know, we are a bit more relaxed about those things here," said one, who for obvious reasons didn't want to be named. But he then warned me about the counterfeit ticket problem, before asking why Americans don't know where Manitoba is.

Ten minutes later, I spotted two men and a woman wearing electric yellow sheriff's jackets, standing about 20 feet from a man selling tickets. I turned my back to him, quietly showed them my press pass, and inquired: "What is the law in British Columbia?"  I discovered that I'd apparently stumbled on the Canadian equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.

"You'll have to ask the by-law people."

"You can't tell me what the law is?"

"You'll have to ask the by-law people."

"What if I don't ask you as a reporter, just as a person who might buy a ticket. Is it legal to do so?"

"You'll have to ask the by-law people."

Not among my best interviews.

I was about to ask the obvious question ("What's a by-law person?") when one of them spotted a polite way out of the conversation.

"Go ask him, that guy on the bike over there."

The guy on the bike was a Vancouver city cop.  He also didn't want to be quoted. But he was serious.

"It's illegal to sell anything without a permit in the city of Vancouver," he told me.  "You are subject to a $250 fine and seizure of the items you're selling."

The fine hardly seemed a big risk, given the potential financial rewards, but the officer assured me that he was not to be taken lightly.

"I have about 50 or 60 tickets right here," he said, pointing to his backpack.  "Some guys lost a lot of money today."

At this point, I scanned the horizon.  No scalpers were in sight.  Clearly, they were afraid of this cop.

He also warned about counterfeiters.

"The guys from France of Germany are long gone by the time you are at your event and can't get in," he said.

Despite this policeman's welcome clarity, my confusion over the legality of ticket scalping grew even more as the day wore on. While I was hearing about confiscated tickets, the Vancouver organizing committee was busy telling reporters that scalping was indeed legal.

"It's important for those of you who may not be from (British Columbia) to know that scalping is not illegal here," committee spokeswoman Renee Marie-Valade said at a news conference, according to a transcript provided by NBC. "So we are certainly aware that people may be selling tickets. We keep a close eye out for it."

She then went to great pains to steer prospective customers to her agency's Web site.

" The best advice to any consumer who is still looking to buy a ticket … particularly if you are thinking about buying from someone that's offering them on the street is to be very, very wary of that because that ticket may end up leaving you disappointed at the entrance to the venue," she said.

Almost scammed
Just how big a problem are counterfeits?

Joseph Rupolo of Long Island, N.Y., said he stopped his father on Tuesday, just moments before he was about to shell out $200 at Robson Square for fake tickets to a women's hockey game. Rupolo, an intern for the NBC Olympics team, had seen legitimate tickets at the office, with their trademark hologram logo. The tickets his father was about to buy were missing the logo.

"I checked the competition schedule later that day and found that Sweden wasn't even competing against Japan that evening," he said.

He then spent the afternoon pricing tickets on Craigslist and other online sources -- which are plentiful, if risky. A man named Cory offered to sell tickets to the men's hockey semifinal for $1,000.

"I have the hard copy tickets here in Vancouver and will exchange in person at my place or at a bank. I will provide full proof of purchase and validity upon exchange," he wrote in an e-mail.

Goal! Eventually
Robert Broughton of New Westminster, British Columbia, told me he actually managed to successfully buy scalped tickets earlier this week in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, but not without a bit of agony. First, he tried to attend the women's 3,000 meter speed skating race, but prices ranged from $250 to $400 each. He headed back to the train, where a seller hard-pitched him a ticket for $300, even though the event had already started.

But over at Thunderbird Arena, where women's hockey is being played, he managed to buy a spare ticket from an "amateur" seller for face value at $50 -- after milling about for nearly an hour.

His advice: "Don't waste your time talking to professional scalpers, especially ones with thick English accents. Their sole objective is to cheat you."

Yes, many scalpers are pros. In fact, Broughton recognized some of the sellers from 1994, when he attended the Lillehammer, Norway games.

For obvious reasons, there is no good data on the amount of scalping at Olympic Games, and no way to know if Vancouver is doing better or worse than other games. With 1.6 million tickets for sale this time around, there's plenty of opportunity for mischief – and last-minute ticket purchases.  It's quite clear, however, that the Vancouver Olympic Committee's efforts to stamp out fraud and scalping by profiting off of it have not been an unqualified success.

Houston-based attorney Jim Moriarty, who was a ticket scam victim in Houston, now runs a Web site called Olympic Ticket Scam.  He blames continued ticket problems on the International Olympic Committee's convoluted process for purchasing tickets and the fact that it makes tickets so scarce that athlete family members have trouble getting into events.

"There is a Code of Points used in the judging system for gymnastics. Where is the Code of Ethics for ticket distribution?" he asked in a recent post on his Web site. "There are volumes of rules and regulations for each Olympic sport; for judging; and for procedures. ... The specifics for distributing tickets? Not so clear."

Broughton, the Canadian fan who bought tickets from scalpers, also complained that Olympic tickets are kept artificially scarce, with many going to corporate partners, leaving few for local fans and travelers. As evidence for his complaint, he pointed to empty seats at many events.

"After the game started, there were at least 500 empty seats at a supposedly sold-out event," he complained. "I'm still steamed about all the empty seats at the women's ice hockey game on Sunday. I would love to hear a reporter ask the' People In Charge' who holds these tickets, so that we all know that they were inconsiderate enough to leave them in a desk drawer."

Reporters did ask Marie-Valade about the empty seat problem.  She said the committee had a "ticket SWAT team" looking into the problem, and offered this explanation.

"It's a complex environment because we have tickets that are sold to the public. Typically, what we are seeing is those seats that are sold the public are being used. Some of the blocs that you are seeing may in fact be not used through a variety of different programs that we have," she said.  "We have an obligation to provide seats to athletes who may or may not be able to come watch the sports. There are a range of Olympic Family programs that provide seating. We are always looking at those and there's a whole team of people who go to each sport event and look at where the empty seats are and come back and analyze what we can do for the next one to make sure those seats are filled. "

Readers of Ron Paul would say that attempts to regulate ticket sales have predictably failed, and that a thriving black market has developed -- as always happens when any agency seeks to artificially control the distribution of goods and services. There is little argument that capitalism is alive and well in Vancouver.  Right next to the scalpers were tables of women selling the must-have fashion accessory of these games -- poofy red mittens that say "Canada" and include the familiar maple leaf.  They sold for $23 on Robson Square.  At the drugstore five blocks away, they cost $12.99.

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