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megpie71

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July 24th, 2015

megpie71: Simplified bishie Rufus Shinra glares and says "The Look says it all" (glare)
Friday, July 24th, 2015 09:52 am
Apparently-From: Secret Shopper[unknown unicode character] (spamfilter@weather3000.com)
Subject: [Bulk] **JOB APPLICATION: BECOME A MYSTERY SHOPPER®2015**
Reply-to: tyliebmann@gmail.com
Addressed To: [blank]

Scam body below )

This one actually overlaps both categories of scam I've been alerting people about - it's a bogus "employment" offer, and a cover for an attempt at advance fee fraud. So, time to see which scam flags it's flying.

1) Contact offering unskilled "employment" out of nowhere, completely unsolicited. As I've said repeatedly in the employment scam posts in the past, in a declining economy (which is what most Western countries are experiencing at present) where unemployment is high, employers do not have to solicit candidates for unskilled roles - they're more likely to be turning them away in droves. Therefore anyone offering you one of those out of the blue in these circumstances is, at the very least, highly dodgy.

2) Offer of an immediate start with no interview. Most legitimate employers will at least want to meet up with you in person before they offer you the contract, because they're looking to keep you on for at least the short term, and they need you to be able to work with the rest of their team.

3) Apparently corporate personage emailing you with a gmail throw-away reply-to address. This is dodgy as well - if this person is working for a company, why aren't they emailing us from their corporate address and getting us to send our replies to that corporate address? The address at weather3000.com is owned by the Aerospace & Marine International Corporation, based in California, which you'll note isn't mentioned anywhere in the text of the email. Either they've hijacked the email server to send from, or we're looking at someone trying to set up a scam using their employer's resources... no matter which way you slice it, this doesn't send positive messages about their trustworthiness.

4) Googling the search string "MH Recruitment secret shopper" gives you a page of warnings about this being a scam. This is usually a pretty big hint.

As always, best policy is to delete these without replying to them.