Reply of the Aupair World Support Team

Dear Juliane,

Thank you very much for your email. You did the right thing by informing us on this attempt to defraud.

Apparently, criminals have found themselves a new „market“. At present, they directly contact their victims through Facebook and similar networks. In this context, they often refer to Aupair World. Therefore, it is very important to us to raise our users' awareness with regard to this kind of defraud. Thus, we keep reporting on up-to-date cases, e.g. on our "Security" page or in the context of our question of the week, which you just mentioned.  

The criminals always use the same trick, but the content of their emails can vary accordingly: thus, it is at times a terrific so-called au pair who is writing; some other time it may well be a so-called host family who is trying to contact an au pair through Facebook. What they have in common is that they keep asking for advance payments in the course of correspondence.

If you know this fraudulent practice, you can easily protect yourself: simply do not make any advance payments and immediately end all conversation with the respective person! We are happy to see that our efforts of regularly warning our users have not been in vain: we have only received few enquiries concerning the topic of defraud (scam) lately.

If you have any doubts with regard to scam, you should always contact our support team. As a result, not only the person receiving the fake mails can protect himself/herself, but he/she also contributes to the protection of other users. Hence, we can immediately warn all our users of new scam cases.

Additionally, you should also inform Facebook about this matter. This is the only way to take the necessary measures against those Facebook users.

Best regards
YourAupair World Support Team