To do this, the traffickers gave her an international number to make it look like she was already abroad when she contacted them.
"They take you to the airport and you dress well like you're about to travel. They give you a passport, give you fake travel papers," she explained.
"Then they take your photo so you can send them to your friends and family."
Aminata managed to persuade six friends and relatives to join the scheme, still hoping the job in the US would materialise. It never did.
"I felt awful because they wasted their money and they suffered because of me."
She was held somewhere on the outskirts of Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, for about a year before it dawned on her that the job would never be forthcoming.
When Aminata failed to recruit anyone else, it seems she was deemed of no more use to the traffickers - and when she decided to escape, she was not stopped.
Returning home after everything that had happened, especially when everyone had thought she had been living abroad, was hard.
"I was scared to go back home," she said.
"I'd told my friends that I'd travelled abroad. I'd told my family the same. I was thinking about all the money they'd given me to get there."