I received a scam email recently asking me if I wanted to “take up a job” for a few months while someone is goes on leave. The salary is not huge but pretty decent ($3.5k/month + some sort of commission) and I’m instructed to contact someone in Taiwan to make the arrangements. I assume the next step is that I will give them my bank account etc (for direct deposit), which then will get cleared out.

This seems like a particularly pernicious type of internet fraud because it doesn’t involve egregious amounts of money (vs. Nigerian bank scams) and there is so much unemployment in the US right now that people would be happy to take that job for 3 months.

Is this a new kind of scam? It seems different from the “work from home and make $70k” things I’ve seen before.