A DM promised easy money. Delivered the opposite.

Finals week left me short on cash, so when an Instagram DM offered five hundred dollars a day reshipping packages or paid likes, I replied and asked how it worked instead of deleting it—I needed something that fit between classes.

By the next evening they had my address, emailed a “training fee” invoice, and the first parcel arrived with my name on the label and instructions to strip one sticker and forward the box.

The pace felt rushed, so before I sealed anything I sat in the library and searched “reshipping scam.”

The articles described my week almost step for step: stolen cards pay for goods, mules forward them, and investigators often start with whoever’s address is on the parcel.

I never forwarded the boxes, but the training fee was already gone and they still had my details, so I loaded the parcels into a bag, walked to campus security, and ended up at the police station with a report number.

While those messages and parcels were stacking up, I kept telling myself this was rent and textbooks, not something criminal, and that anyone that broke would have done the same—desperation made it easy to scroll past warnings until the pattern looked too tidy to be a normal job.

At the station the detective matched the labels to stolen payment data and recorded that I had not shipped and had come in on my own, which settled whether I would be treated as tied to the fraud or as someone who stopped in time.

I still lost the fee, and for months I half-expected another ping or odd package because my address sat in their system—opening the mailbox stopped feeling routine.

Easy money in a DM is usually someone else’s scheme.

I should have closed the chat at “daily pay” and used normal job boards instead of letting a stranger set the tempo of my week.

• Never forward packages for strangers; you may be laundering stolen goods.
• Report recruitment DMs to the platform and, if you received goods, to local police.

For more help, see our Report a scam page and Spot and avoid scams guide.