Job offer scams

With the recession still in full swing, scammers have been taking advantage of the situation by targeting people looking for work.

There's the old and familiar 'advance fee' scam where people are offered positions, such as 'mystery shoppers', but have to pay a fee up front...

But there's also other ways that scams are being operated. One is where people are randomly emailed (perhaps the email was harvested from the internet) and told that their online CV has been read by a recruitment agency and that there's a job vacancy they're suitable for. All they need to do to apply is confirm their personal details.

Of course, this is phishing and an identity theft scam and they're after your personal details.

Another, potentially much worse, scam is where scammers are setting up websites that look like recruitment agencies and when people enter all of their personal information into their online CV, not only could identity theft occur, you could end up with a bogus job.

They're recruiting people to act as 'financial managers' (and similar titles) whose responsibility is to move around funds for e-commerce transactions. In reality, what they're doing is unwittingly money laundering for criminals as a money mule.

Although scams, such as advance fee scams, should be relatively easy to protect yourself against as you should always be suspicious of any opportunity or prize that requires you to pay up front; but this type of recruitment scam is much harder to spot.

Most people are probably at least wary of giving out personal information on the internet but the clever part of recruitment scams is that filling out a CV and submitting it to a recruitment agency might seem like a perfectly reasonable instance of when you do give over personal information on the internet. The normalised perception we have of dealing with recruitment agencies and providing personal information could mean we drop our guard.

We can protect ourselves against many scams by learning how to spot a scam, but sometimes you just have to learn about scams individually as they can be particularly clever at deceiving even the most astute amongst us.
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