Online Employment Scams And Organized Crime

March 5th, 2008

There’s a scam involving online job search sites. If you have a resume posted, you can be targeted.

Case study

Company selling software wants “local sales managers”. Pay incentive can be high, up to $40,000 USD.

The job offer comes with a contract, and a requirement for a business account with a Biller Code.

Generally the “job” is receiving payments and transferring them to a third party, usually in Eastern Europe using another payment method like Western Union.

This is straight out money laundering. Clumsy as it looks, it works. It’s difficult to monitor payments without some use of resources and time. The scams can stay ahead of monitoring, to some extent.

Likely sources of email scams, and what to look out for

Sources:

Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, are well known.

Any unknown contact should be considered suspect.

What to look out for

• Unsolicited emails
• Work which doesn’t fit your resume.
• Offers of large amounts of money for work.
• Insistence on account and registration of business. This is cosmetic.
• Bad English, poor answers to questions.
• Website which doesn’t contain details of your contact.
• If you contact the employer direct, and don’t get an answer.
• Anything which doesn’t make sense as business practice.

HOW TO HANDLE JOB SCAMS

Do not provide account details to anyone.

Having established the job is a scam, report to:

• Your local Federal police. Give all details, keep whatever emails or other information you have, in case they need it.

• Your bank or financial institution. Same story, tell them not to accept anything from the scam source.

• The job website. Their security people will want copies, and will also approach the police. You’ll need to think about whether you want to keep your resume on that site, too.

• If you know what payment method is to be used to transfer money, report to them. Western Union for example have a security section which handles fraud and scams.

• Your email provider. Explain your concerns about the source of the emails. Yahoo, Google and others have an ongoing global security network, and the more they know about scams the safer everyone is.

DON’TS

Don’t retaliate directly. Deserving as these slimy little bastards are, there’s no point in creating problems for yourself.

Leave it to those who can actually put them out of business. That does them more damage than anything else. Tempting as it might be to trash their websites, or try denial of service attacks, etc, it’s asking for trouble.