It started with a text message — the kind that seemed legitimate enough to merit a reply. By the time an Upper West Side resident realized what had actually landed in her inbox, she was out roughly $20,000.
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Kathryn Detweiler said the sender claimed to be a recruiter and name-dropped one of her former employers to build credibility. The pitch eventually led her to a website she believed belonged to a New York-based marketing firm called Mediareach, where her supposed job was to approve online advertisements for recognizable brands like Strava, AXS Tickets, and Monopoly. The wrinkle: she had to fund the ads with her own money, with the promise of repayment plus a bonus.The promise initially held up. A roughly $18 investment came back as about $120 — enough to make the operation look real.
What followed was a slow drain. Over the next several months, Detweiler kept funding ads, and her balance on the site climbed steadily. But each time she tried to withdraw, she was told she needed to put more money in first. The number on her screen, it turned out, wasn’t backed by anything. By the time her family stepped in and told her she was being scammed, the total she had wired into the operation came to roughly $20,000.
“They will just milk you until you’re dry,” Detweiler told CBS New York, which first reported on her experience.
The real Mediareach is a UK-based marketing firm with no U.S. operations, and the company confirmed that scammers had cloned portions of its website to build the fraudulent version. That site — mediareach-us.it.com — remains live, still prompting visitors to log in or create an account.
The broader trend behind Detweiler’s story is grim. Federal Trade Commission figures show Americans reported $630 million in losses to job scams last year, a 385% spike since 2021. The Better Business Bureau says it has received at least 10 reports about the fake Mediareach operation alone in the past six months.
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The BBB’s standard advice on this kind of pitch: don’t engage with unsolicited job offers that arrive by text, call, or email, and never pay anything in order to be hired. BBB representative Claire Rosenzweig described the dynamic as preying on people who are vulnerable and earnestly trying to find work.Detweiler said the loss has squeezed her finances to the point where buying groceries some weeks has become difficult, and she’s had to pick up extra hours where she can. She said she’s hoping investigators can eventually figure out where the money went.
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