Scam Job Offers: How To Identify Them
Jan. 22nd, 2018 11:29 amLast week was super busy for me, and I am too tired to talk about most of it, but I wanted to write up my experience with a particular scam type as informational for other people. One of the things on which I spent time and energy I didn't have to spare last week was a job interview that turned out to be fake.
Honestly it just pisses me the fuck off, I am an unemployed person desperately putting out my resume to dozens of linkedin and indeed listings, I don't have income because I am unemployed, but someone is going to hijack my efforts and try to squeeze money out of me somehow??
I've seen a couple of these before, and even when I didn't actually bite as far as interviewing, the effort I put into proving to myself it was a scam and not a legitimate job offer was so exhausting.
The scam goes something like this: You apply to a job listing. You receive a reply that the job has already been filled, but your resume was so impressive this person wants to hire you as a personal assistant. They're traveling out of the country and need immediately to hire someone to do some purchasing for them. They'll send you the money! You don't have to spend your own money!
I always assumed step 2 if you bite that far is they would ask for your bank account number to "send you money" or set up direct deposit or something, and then empty your account instead. But I heard from a banker this week, and apparently how the scam works is they send you a check/cashier's check for a greater amount than whatever they're asking you to buy for this fake job, and then they ask you to send the rest of the money back to them. This is some kind of money laundering scheme. My mother assumed the check would bounce after you'd sent them back money from the check written in bad faith, so that you would actually be directly robbed; I don't completely rule that out even though my reaction was "that shouldn't be possible with a cashier's check" because scams exist where scammers figure out how to exploit loopholes, right? But frankly as a money laundering thing, it doesn't even matter if the check is bad. They could send you real, dirty money, and if you send some back to them, it's clean, so they get what they want even without getting the full amount back.
If you happen to be running across this advice after having gotten in deep enough that the scammers have already sent you a check, or if you decide you want to make them pay rather than just avoid this mess, what you should do is take the check to the fraud department at your bank. They'll work on tracing it back and catching the scammers.
If you just want to avoid wasting time and energy on scams, the red flags I observed include:
Hoping by writing this all out I can save fellow job-seekers some trouble, and help myself formulate a checklist I can use to nope out of this shit without expending too much effort on it.
Honestly it just pisses me the fuck off, I am an unemployed person desperately putting out my resume to dozens of linkedin and indeed listings, I don't have income because I am unemployed, but someone is going to hijack my efforts and try to squeeze money out of me somehow??
I've seen a couple of these before, and even when I didn't actually bite as far as interviewing, the effort I put into proving to myself it was a scam and not a legitimate job offer was so exhausting.
The scam goes something like this: You apply to a job listing. You receive a reply that the job has already been filled, but your resume was so impressive this person wants to hire you as a personal assistant. They're traveling out of the country and need immediately to hire someone to do some purchasing for them. They'll send you the money! You don't have to spend your own money!
I always assumed step 2 if you bite that far is they would ask for your bank account number to "send you money" or set up direct deposit or something, and then empty your account instead. But I heard from a banker this week, and apparently how the scam works is they send you a check/cashier's check for a greater amount than whatever they're asking you to buy for this fake job, and then they ask you to send the rest of the money back to them. This is some kind of money laundering scheme. My mother assumed the check would bounce after you'd sent them back money from the check written in bad faith, so that you would actually be directly robbed; I don't completely rule that out even though my reaction was "that shouldn't be possible with a cashier's check" because scams exist where scammers figure out how to exploit loopholes, right? But frankly as a money laundering thing, it doesn't even matter if the check is bad. They could send you real, dirty money, and if you send some back to them, it's clean, so they get what they want even without getting the full amount back.
If you happen to be running across this advice after having gotten in deep enough that the scammers have already sent you a check, or if you decide you want to make them pay rather than just avoid this mess, what you should do is take the check to the fraud department at your bank. They'll work on tracing it back and catching the scammers.
If you just want to avoid wasting time and energy on scams, the red flags I observed include:
- The big one, the thing their scheme hinges on: they want you to buy equipment for the job, and they will send you a check to do so.
- Typos and poor grammar. Like, yeah, sometimes real people make mistakes or write colloquially, but generally when they're writing emails in a professional setting to potential employees, they make an effort to clean it up. Scammers, for whatever reason, don't bother as much, and their bad grammar doesn't sound colloquial, just wrong. Verb tenses, plural/singular mix-ups, that kind of thing.
- Form email without all the blanks filled in, such as, not using your name in the greeting or signing the email with a job title but not the individual's name. Especially if it also has typos and weird grammar.
- The pay they're offering is too good to be true. One email offered me $1000 per week, another said $25/hr. I know there are fields where that's not absurd but I'm applying to super basic clerical, receptionist, administrative assistant type jobs, no one's going to pay that much. The most frustrating thing about this is, when the pay is that good, I feel like I have to put more effort into proving it's a scam, because what if I was wrong, what an incredible opportunity would I be ignoring? But if it sounds too good to be true, it is.
- They want to hire you immediately, sight unseen. Both the immediately and the without talking to you are red flags. If it's a company of any size at all, HR will take at least a week to process you through, and there will be paperwork for you to sign. And companies offering legit jobs do not hire you without talking to you at all. Think about it--why would they pull your resume out of the stack and say "this one" when they probably have dozens if not hundreds of resumes? Scammers, on the other hand, will contact anyone whose resume they receive, tell everyone their resume is so great they want to hire them on the spot, and then run the whole money laundering crap on however many people they can get to bite.
- The one I encountered last week wanted to do an interview in Google Hangouts. The email said it would be a Google Video Call, which sounded potentially legit to me, but the video call never manifested, we just did it all by chat, which..... no. (Also apparently real jobs wouldn't use Google Video Calls even, maybe Skype or Facetime, but not Google Video Calls.) The interview was followed by a request for me to wait for 10 minutes while she (I say she because the name she gave me was Mary, but I don't really know) consulted with the head of her department; after that 10 minute period she offered me the job, and wanted to schedule me to talk to a training supervisor at 8am the next day. Too fast, huge red flag, legit companies don't put people into training until their hire paperwork goes through.
- The first couple of these I ran into, their web presence was inadequate. Their websites were super simple, one still had example text from a template.
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enemyofperfect was helping me investigate and image-googled an employee picture on one of these websites, and discovered the picture was of a guy from Zimbabwe who ran a South African communications conglomerate, not the founder of a construction company in California. When I googled street addresses, they usually didn't exist or were something else, a residence rather than a business for example. Apparently scammers are getting smarter and instead of inventing false businesses, they're just flying false flags. The last one told me they were Broadcom, a company real enough to have been in recent news for potential anti-trust violations. They gave me Broadcom's real website and real street address. But the person who wanted to interview me only gave me a google email address to contact her for the interview, and the original email's domain was for a small print shop with a really super basic website (....uh-huh), and no affiliation with Broadcom. The switch on what company was offering me a job was a red flag in and of itself, and it was an additional red flag that the person did not use an email address associated with the company that verifiably existed, that they supposedly represented.
Hoping by writing this all out I can save fellow job-seekers some trouble, and help myself formulate a checklist I can use to nope out of this shit without expending too much effort on it.
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