Scamming Looks Like A Growth Industry In These Economic Times

from the jobseeker-beware dept

Wed, Mar 11th 2009 1:14am — Carlo Longino

Scammers look they're being stimulated by the government's stimulus plan, and it seems likely that they're finding plenty of marks in these gloomy economic times. For instance, fake job ads that are fronts for identity theft are up 345% over the last three years. It wouldn't be a stretch to think they'll become even more common, as more and more people start searching for jobs -- and their desperation leads them to lower their defenses in hopes of landing employment.

Filed Under: economy, scams

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Dav, 11 Mar 2009 @ 2:33am

Employment scam for money in the UK, are these just too easy to do?
I was watching a news program recently in the UK where a fake employment scam was used to take money from job seekers, and them propagate the scam further.

link to the article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/content/articles/2009/02/27/east_s15_w8_scam_video_feature.shtml

I think there are other elements to this other then letting your guard down. Many job applications rely on a reply to an advert that can be hard to verify and then sending a great deal of personal information. We also have to consider in the case of the UK scam the adverts were appearing in a trusted source for vacancies and so people have even less reason to doubt it. True as soon as the company begins to ask for money you should pull out as something is clearly wrong, but at that point the process is most of the way complete.

In the main case in this article a convincing advert in a reputable location is all the scammers need to take your personal details with minimal effort as the job seeker will have very little reason to assume the ad is in fact fake.
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Wolfy, 11 Mar 2009 @ 4:14am

In the olden days, if one was terminally stupid, one didn't live long enough (hopefully) to reproduce. Now days, it just costs one money.
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The Old Fart, 11 Mar 2009 @ 7:06am

A worse employment scam
How about one that wastes the time of people applying for jobs when there are no job available?

It's what James Orr does on craigslist. He posts fake job ads and fake real estate ads all over craigslist (looks like about 30,000 posts per month). The job ads redirect the user to one of his many domains which have only a simple for for submitting e-mail address and name.

He varies the appearance of the website and then takes the results of his "experiments" and publishes them on his ruthlessaccountability domain as "marketing research".

So basically people desperate for jobs in the nearest thing we'll ever see to a depression, people who need work to put food on the table and Orr is out there screwing with them, luring them all to "apply" for non-existent jobs.

He turns around and sells himself as a marketing "genius" on all his other domains (howtoberich info and biz and a ton of others)
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Norm, 11 Mar 2009 @ 7:16am

Re:
I don't think one has to be terminally stupid to have their identity stolen.

There are a lot more clever ways they get victims other than Nigerian Bank scams.
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swag, 11 Mar 2009 @ 10:11am

My question is: with growth rates like this, how do I invest?
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TwoSpirits, 11 Mar 2009 @ 11:19pm

Scams....
They're on Monster. I will no longer submit a resume to a blind ad. The last time I did, I was the recipient of five phishing letters. I even got a cashiers check for over 3,000.00 that isn't worth the paper its printed on.
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