Commonly, mules are recruited with job advertisements for "payment processing agents", "money transfer agents", "local processors", and other similar titles; the real benefit to the criminals is not the work carried out by the mule, but that the criminals are distanced from the risky, visible transfer. Some money mules are recruited by an attractive member of the opposite sex. After deducting a relatively small payment for themselves, candidates are asked to accept funds and to forward them to a third party, via
remote work. Legitimate companies use
escrow services for this kind of work. Mules recruited online are typically used to transfer the proceeds from online fraud, such as
phishing scams,
malware scams or scams that operate around auction sites like
eBay. After money or merchandise has been stolen, the criminal employs a mule to transfer the money or goods, hiding the criminal's true identity and location from the victim of the crime and the authorities. By using instant payment mechanisms such as
Western Union, the mule allows the thief to transform a reversible and traceable transaction into an irreversible and untraceable one. If an innocent third party's bank details have been compromised, they can be used as a mule without their knowledge, something sometimes called "Cuckoo smurfing".
Bitcoin ATMs were reported by
Brian Krebs in 2016 to be rising in popularity for money muling. ==Penalties==