The Dreamwidth Account

From: Eliza Wilson (acct@evergoldcorpltd.com)
Subject: [Bulk] We are looking for [my email address here]
Reply-To: [none listed]
Addressed to Me: yes

( scam body under fold )

Okay, as per usual the standard "job" scam flags are flying with this one - contacting me out of the blue in a declining economy, promising large sums of money for very little work.

Googling "the Brit Method" comes up with a whole page basically saying it's a stock market scam. I'm not going to be duplicating someone else's efforts here, but be aware, anything which is selling itself as a "method" for playing the stock market is about as reliable as any other "method" for making heaps of money by gambling (horses, poker, casinos, you name it - the stock market is just another gambling venue). That is to say, the most reliable way to make money from such things is to be the person selling the "method" to gullible suckers.

If you've received one of these, just delete it. Don't click on the links, and don't believe the promises of lots of money. The only people making money out of this scheme are the people selling it.

The fake job scammers are at it again. This time, they're sending stuff out under my email address! How do I know this? Well, I woke up this morning to discover I had an inbox full of delivery failure notices.

So here's the ad body:

( scam body )

The bits in square brackets are where the script which sends these things out picks from a list of options to "personalise" the emails. Essentially, one of those options is chosen for each version of the mail at random (where there's only one option, the text itself is optional), in order to bypass spam filters on the servers they're hijacking to get their "message" out (the spam filters are looking for large amounts of similar text; the programs which generate these emails are evolving in lock-step with the filtering programs. If you're ever looking for a good locus for emergent AI, consider the possibilities of email filtering and spam blocking software, and the stuff designed to get around it!).

Now, the email address to check for "more details" varies with each of the letters - here's a list of the selection I have, if you're wanting to know what to beware of:

( List below fold )

The Subject lines also vary. Again, here are the ones I have available from the sample of delivery failure notices.

( List below fold )

(Incidentally - this is why keeping track of the subject lines and body text of these emails is a bit of a waste of time. The body text is boilerplate, the subject line is randomised.)

On to the scam flags flying:

1) They're offering too much. For full-time work, they're offering "up to" $5900AUD per month, which is $295 per day, or $36.88 per hour, plus bonuses, for largely unskilled admin work. Note the "up to" there - that's the theoretical maximum you could earn in a month. The actual amount you'll be paid is probably much lower, if, indeed,you're likely to be paid at all, rather than having your accounts hoovered out.

2) A lot of the details essential to a standard job ad are missing or skimped. There's no mention of who the company is in quite a lot of the ads (because it doesn't exist), there's no listing of what kinds of skills and experience they're looking for (because the main skill or quality they're after is gullibility). The contact address is a hotmail throw-away account with no reference to the name of the company either (which is a rather severe mismatch to the story of a company which is big enough to be trading with clients in the USA, Europe and Asia, especially given the comparatively low cost of domain names and domain hosting).

3) The economy world-wide is largely contracting. You can hear the economic gloom and doom forecasts any time you turn on the TV or radio, or any time you look at a news article online or in a newspaper. In that kind of economic environment, employment becomes harder to get - there is a surplus of people looking for work, and a deficit of available employment for them to participate in. In such an economy, there is no need for a legitimate employer to reach out to random people on the internet if they're seeking employees. Indeed, most job ads I'm looking at these days say they're only going to be contacting the successful candidates for interviews, due to the sheer volume of replies.

4) Googling "LKT Company" brings up at least two scam warnings already. This is always something of a hint. About the only difference between the current "jobs" being offered and the previous scam is that the amount of money has been increased by $100AUD on each level.

5) They hijacked my flippin' email account to send these things out! (I grant you, that one's a bit of a personal thing). Needless to say I've altered my password. But if you EVER receive a job offer purporting to be sent from megpie71 at yahoo dot com dot ay you, it's guaranteed to be a scam. I don't do HR, and if I did do HR, I would be sending things out under a corporate email address, not from my private email.

There isn't a job open, the money doesn't exist, and if they had anything decent to offer they wouldn't need to be hijacking other people's email addresses in order to pass the message on.

Apparently-From: Alex Brook (stripe@alexandra-krumm-beratung.de)
Subject Line: [Bulk] Personal Assistant Needed (part time job)
Reply-to: alex.brook2@aol.com
Addressed to me: No

( Scam body under fold )

This is a scam.

Firstly: "Brook Construction Company" doesn't appear to exist - there's quite a few entries in Google for "Brooks Construction Company" in the USA (all in Indiana, according to the map on Google), and one entry for Brook Construction (no "company") in Canada (Newfoundland and Labrador regions).

Secondly: The role of PA is not usually a "work from home" role - or at least, not "work from your own home". "Work from the boss's home", yeah, sure I can see that happening, but it's more likely to be an in-office role. Which means even if this were legit, and even if this were a genuine offer, you'd need to know where the company is based in order to take on the job. (At the very least, you'd need to know the time zone the company is based in - if this were genuinely a US company, as someone in zone GMT+8, I'd need to be working some very unusual hours indeed in order to hold down the job).

Thirdly: If this were a legitimate job offer, it would be on a legitimate job search website. It would not be sent out as a bulk email to random people on a spam mailing list. As always, in situations where economies have contracted and unemployment is high, the power is on the side of the employer - candidates go looking for them, they don't come looking for you unless you have some VERY specialised skill sets, or unless they know you personally and are aware you'd be a good fit.

Legitimate offers of employment generally come from people who have interviewed you - legitimate employers want to make sure you'd be a good fit in their corporate culture, and for a job such as Personal Assistant, there's the need to ensure you're not going to be a poor fit with that particular boss, too.

Fourthly: For a job opportunity, there's remarkably little information about what you're going to be required to do, and how many hours a week you're going to be required to do it. The weekly salary of $350 translates to $8.75 per hour for a standard 40 hour work week (which is, I think, slightly above US minimum wage, but well below the minimum wage here in Australia). So you'd need to know how many hours per week you're expected to work for that $350.

They also don't ask for any skills, and don't ask you to send in a resume. Why, it's almost as though they aren't interested in your skills at all. Which means there must be something else they're after.

Finally: The email addresses don't match up to the offer. The email address this is apparently from is the domain for a psychologist in Germany (and I suspect she's more than a little annoyed about having her email hijacked by spammers). The reply-to address is an AOL throw-away address. If you're dealing with a company large enough for the CEO to need a personal assistant (and let's be honest - the CEO's personal assistant would be a full-time role, not a part-time one) then you'd also expect to be dealing with a company large enough to handle having its own web presence, internal email, and domain.

Don't respond, don't apply, and don't expect to be seeing that $350 per week, either.

(I find with these sorts of things it helps to think of any monetary amounts as the scammer's minimum goal).

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.

Apparently-From: Kieran Sanchez (ni@jytaijin.com)
Subject: [Bulk] Employment opportunity : (0985546390441)
Reply-To: Kieran Sanchez (Kuksenko.Evgeniya@gmail.com)

Our company is glad to propose you to taking the office of a customer care manager. Please keep in mind, this is a beginner level office.

Job functions:

Supplying cellular service providers with a new commercial platform by our corporation.
User support and consultation.
Processing requests attributed to our platform icommerce.
Primary aid to our consumers in terms of working within the system.

We provide practice and a trial period.
Applicants are not needed bear peculiar experience with the system iCommerce or analogical systems.

Qualification and proficiency:
- Amenity and the ability of communicating with people
- Carefulness to details
- Skills in writing and editing of corporate-type texts due skills is a pro
- Time-management ability
- Flexibility, sufferance, sobriety

Paying conditions:
A monthly salary of 4000AUD for general working day or up to 2500AUD for part-time employment.

Practice period is remunerated.

It takes three weeks. You will get 400AUD a week.

During the process of instructions, you will familiarize with all operating stage regarding Icommerce platform. In the future, that will provide you the opportunity to orientate yourself and respond to all client matters easily .

If you are interested, we are eager to deliver you some additional information.

If we deem you an appropriate job applicant, we will contact you in the short term.

---
Это сообщение проверено на вирусы антивирусом Avast.
http://www.avast.com

So, scam flags flying:

1) Job "opportunity" sent at random to someone who isn't actually looking for work (I haven't been actively looking for work for about eight to ten months now). In a contracting job market (which we have at the moment - there are more unemployed people than there are jobs to go to) a legitimate employer doesn't need to be sending out recruiting letters at random.

2) Paying too much for the (poorly-described) work they're asking you to do. The wage they're offering is approximately $25 per hour ($4000 per month, divided by four weeks, divided by forty hours per week), and the work they appear to be offering is mostly either low-level stuff you'd expect to be paying minimum wage for, or the kind of thing you'd be expecting to employ much more qualified support staff for.

3) No mention of the company name (the mention of "avast" at the bottom is purely saying the Avast anti-virus program was used to scan it for viruses) or indeed of any company information at all.

4) "From" and "Reply-To" addresses are different domains, and appear to be different people (the "From" address is for a machinery company in China; the Reply-to is a gmail throwaway with an Eastern-European sounding name; neither of these match the name given for the person sending the emails).

5) Marked "[Bulk]" by Yahoo's email systems as it went through, so even though the email is apparently addressed to me, I'm betting they're actually sending the email to a large list of people.

6) Whoever wrote the body text speaks English as probably about a second language at best, possibly third or fourth. The grammar isn't appropriate, the word usage is clumsy, and there are a number of rather obvious mistakes in both.

If you've received one of these, the normal drill applies. Don't reply, don't send them anything, and don't take the job. If I receive more of them, I'll put the Apparently-From, Subject Line, and Reply-To addresses in comments below. If anyone reading this has received one and wants to add to the list, feel free.

This mob aren't even trying to fool people. They're after outright suckers.

"Good day. It is currency exchange company. We bought your email at Internet service. We are sorry for unexpected message but we urgently need the wage-earners. The duty of wage-earners is accept cash or noncash money from our company and deliver them to customers. If you want to try in this job, write us please - Your age
- City where you live
With these information we will decide, if you match for our company or not. If you are interested, write us please. We are sorry if we've disturbed you in vain
Sincerely,
Currency exchange company"

Yeah, that's the whole email.

No details about the company, contacting me out of the blue to offer me an "opportunity" (the only opportunity they're offering is the first-class prime opportunity to get your bank account(s) cleaned out, and possibly your identity stolen) and the "From" address and the Reply-To address on the email both not only don't match, but they also don't have any real connection with the name of the person who's apparently sending this.

From: stimam11@htlkaindorf.at
Reply-To: dan.satan@yahoo.com
Name given: Theodore Goodwin

Oh, and they have clear spam-sign in that the email is not sent to my actual address in the first place - the "To" address on the email indicates they're doing an alphabet attack through Yahoo. Which may be why Yahoo were polite enough to mark this one with a "[Bulk]" warning in the subject header so it landed straight in my junk mail folder.

I suspect they're asking for age and city so they can decide whether it's worth following up on you. If you're in the wrong age demographic - not young enough to be inexperienced about the workplace, not old enough to be desperate for anything you can do, not in a rich enough area to be worth fleecing - I get the feeling you'll never hear back from them. Or at least, not until they've run through the best candidates on their list.

As always: don't reply, don't send them anything to them, and don't, whatever you do, attempt to take them up on their offer of "employment". As always, the core rule is this: a genuine employer isn't going to contact you first; you have to go looking for them.

I'm almost hesitant to put this one up, since it's not quite as subtle a scam as the other ones I've listed - this one is pretty blatant, and tends to get automatically sorted into the "bulk mail" section of my email for me. But hey, just in case anyone out there needs it, here it goes.

It's another employment scam, but this one varies from my previous listings by telling you there's a job opportunity, rather than strongly implying you have a job offer. However the first and foremost caution on employment scams always applies: employers will not be contacting you telling you about job opportunities or job offers out of the blue. Unless you've left your details with them previously, and asked them to contact you when jobs become available, an employer won't bother seeking you out with that information.

(Another strong hint, and the one which decided me about putting this up: I got three of them at once in a single day's email. Someone really wants a bite from this one).

The job title is "Operations Controller", and they don't list a wage. It's only supposed to require a couple of hours each day, and "no practice is required in financial services" (which should trigger scam flag two: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is).

If you want the job, you're supposed to reply to the email, at which point they'll probably either ask for your resume, or they'll send you out an application form asking for all sorts of personal details (I suspect this mob are mostly in the identity theft business). If they're going the full monty, and adding in the "hoover out the bank account" section of the game, they'll offer you a job, give you the two weeks probation period they're offering in the "ad", and then at the end of those two weeks, they'll tell you you're not quite what they're looking for, so sorry. By which time the damage will be done.

In my three different emails regarding this "job", I was contacted by three different people using three different throw-away email accounts, and given two different reply-to addresses.

Dalton Herbert (apparently-from mulin@zahav.net.il), reply to globalarea.financialdepartment@gmail.com
Cameran Munoz (apparently-from ezoenaoki@ybb.ne.jp), reply to globalarea.cargoinvestments@gmail.com
Nolan Cherry (apparently-from qyvat@theyogurtstation.com), reply to globalarea.cargoinvestments@gmail.com

Note the reply-to addresses are all gmail addresses (or in other words, throwaway email) as well. This is the low rent version of the scam, where they're not even going to bother spending the time and money on acquiring a web domain.

Needless to say googling on "global area gargo" gets no results which even look vaguely like a company website - google does the nice thing and redirects you to "global area cargo", which gets lots of results for shipping firms. If you insist on "global area gargo", you get a list of personal web pages which contain the misspelling requested - none of them company sites.

To be honest, this is such a blatant scam it isn't funny. If you wind up with one of these "job offers" showing up in your junk mail filters, leave it there. If it shows up in your main inbox, might I suggest investing in a decent spam blocker? Whatever you do, don't reply to it. The only job they have available is "sucker".

One of the unfortunate hazards for the modern job seeker is the presence of scammers in the job market. These are people who have the nerve to be sending out emails purporting to be job offers, but which are actually offers to open your bank account to these people for cleaning out. I've received a couple of these, and given I'm unemployed and don't have that many assets to start with, I tend to take it a bit personally. So here's how to spot a scam.

The first big hint is you're receiving a job offer out of the blue from a company you've never applied to. The two companies I've received out of the blue offers from are RLB Solution Company, and Constellation Travels. I know I've never applied to these companies, because I keep track of where I'm sending my applications (I'm required to in order to get unemployment benefit). Genuine employers wait for you to contact them. Genuine employers aren't trawling for employees, because employment in the current economy is a buyer's market - there are more people looking for work than there are jobs available.

(Yes, there is such a thing as the head-hunter, who is seeking to get people to move from one employer to another. The thing about head-hunters, though, is they're hunting up at the top end of the market, for people with highly specialised skill sets. They aren't looking around the bottom of the market for lowly Administrative Assistants and Sales Assistants).

The second big hint is when you receive a job offer with no other contact whatsoever. No interview, no preliminary contact, nothing except the job offer showing up in your email box.

A genuine employer will want to interview you. They're wanting to make you a part of their workforce, which means they're going to be looking for the signs of both psychological and literal bad breath or poor hygiene, or anything else which might make for problems in fitting you into their team. Scammers, on the other hand, are looking to find their victim and bleed them dry with the minimum amount of effort, and keep things as impersonal and distanced as possible along the way.

Third big hint is that the job appears to involve a lot of money for not very much work. One of the primary rules for avoiding scammers of all persuasions is this: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Again, the current economy is a buyer's market for employers. So they're not going to be offering you high wages to try and get you started in a low-skilled position. Instead, they're more likely to be low-balling you. A scammer, by contrast, wants to use your greed to hook you in and get you interested, so they're going to be offering lots of money for not much actual work.

Now, some little things which also contribute to the setting off of the "scam" flag. The first is the employer doesn't appear to be located in your country. Now, both of my out-of-the-blue offers ping this one good and hard. RLB Solution turns out to be a firm which appears to be based in Germany (so why are they looking to hire someone in Australia if they don't have an Australian office?). Constellation Travels is based in the Philippines, and also don't have an Australian office (although they say they're going to be opening one in September 2014... pity it's already October).

(If you aren't an actual, established business broker, why would a company be contacting you in order to set up a new office in a country they don't currently do business with? Again, see the "too good to be true" clause).

The second is the company doesn't appear to have a serious web presence. RLB Solution has a website which appears to consist of one page, in German, plus a PDF file (http://rlbsolution.com/vacansy%28eng%29.pdf) detailing the job they have open[1]. The job description is the only part of the site which is actually in English, and they don't offer an English-language translation.

Constellation Travels, by contrast, has a website which is all about offering bespoke Asian tours to rich customers, mostly in the USA and Europe. They don't have a careers page, and they don't appear to be recruiting. Also their news highlights stop at February 2011.

The third one is the people who are contacting you appear not to have a web presence either. Or rather, their web presence is rather insubstantial. For example, the person contacting me from RLB Solution purports to be Anna Stern, their Hiring Coordinator, Human Resources. Except... she isn't mentioned on their website. She doesn't appear to exist on LinkedIn. The nearest Facebook has for her is Anne Stern. The same goes for the person who's supposed to be contacting me from Constellation Travels, Adrian Forlan. He isn't mentioned on their website. He doesn't appear to exist on LinkedIn. He isn't available on Facebook.

What's even more interesting - neither of them appear to have an online presence anywhere else, either. I'm not on Facebook or LinkedIn myself, but I have a fairly wide-ranging history online.

None of these minor things are really key indicators on their own. It's the combination of all of them which sets my "scam" flag to snapping in the metaphorical breeze.

But of course, the real indicator is in the job descriptions, once you finally access them. If anyone is offering you money to "process online transactions" or "process transactions via Western Union", it's a pretty good warning they're not planning to actually give you money. They're planning to take all of yours. Most banks in most countries these days will deal quite successfully in currency exchange - it's not like it's a huge issue. So what would they need you for? Why would they need access to your bank account to "process transactions"?

They don't. The reason they need access to your bank account is so they can take all your money instead.

So, if any of you out there are getting emails from Anna Stern of rlbsolution.com, or Adrian Forlan of constellationtravels.com, offering jobs you can't remember applying for, just hit delete.


[1] Incidentally, this pings off another warning - the job offers payment in $NZ, not $AU. If they're not even offering payment in my currency, why do they need an Australian representative again?

Edited 06 FEB 2015 to add: I've done an updated post on RLB Solution. It's available at http://megpie71.dreamwidth.org/52222.html.