This is not a new phenomenon but it is one that has started to hit the headlines again in recent days, because the scam artists are hitting more and more and innocent job seekers in the online job hunting market place are the prime target.

Scammers are increasingly making big promises of high paying jobs but with a kick in the tail, they want you to pay them in most cases a £50 “registration fee” but in other cases they are asking for amounts up to £500.

The major jobsites are working hard to monitor their websites and remove the unscrupulous adverts, but the smaller jobsites who are in the business of taking as much money as they can are maybe not as strict on who they allow to place adverts on their jobsites.

In the UK we are lucky in the respect of clear laws banning recruitment agencies from charging any fees to job seekers, but many of these scammers are not based in the UK and are so hard to track down and stop, so you constantly need to be on your guard and watch for these people.

It’s such an old saying but such an apt one to constantly remember “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” keep this in mind with each job advert you read.

The normal pattern these people take it to advertise what sounds like a legitimate job and ask you to apply in the normal way, but once you’ve applied then they start with the emails and in some cases phone calls telling you that the job is yours because “you are the perfect person” and “the employer is ready to offer you the job without even interviewing you, because you are that perfect”, these lines are designed to get you all exited and stop you thinking straight, so when they hit you with how much money you have to pay them to secure the job, they are hoping by this time you are so up for it that you’ll reach for the credit card and hand over the details without a second thought.

But the second you do that, you’ve lost your money and you’ll be lucky if you hear from them again, you’ll find they don’t answer the phone (that’s assuming they’ve given you a phone number in the first place” they won’t respond to your emails and in some cases you’ll see a lot more than the so called registration fee disappear from your bank account or credit card.

Many of these people set up PO Box addresses in the UK and get a UK 0845 or 020 number which are freely available to anyone who wants one and then re-direct these numbers to anywhere in the world, so you really have no way of knowing where these people are and this makes it so much harder for you to prove to your bank or credit card company that you have been ripped off.

There are some basic steps you can take to protect you from these online scammers:

1.      Don’t put your home address on your CV when you email it to them

2.      Don’t put your date of birth on your CV

3.      Don’t put your middle name on your CV

4.      Always Google the company name to see if there are any mentions of them on web forums, normally if the “company” you are searching for is known to rip people off then there will be numerous mentions of them all over the internet and you’ll instantly know to avoid them.

5.      Ask the company for a UK landline number and address, then check both the phone number and the address in Google again because other people that have been ripped off will publish these details to warn anyone else off the company.

6.      If they are making claims to be a UK registered Limited company then visit the companies house website at www.companieshouse.gov.uk and use the free web search to find out if they are a real Limited company.

7.      And probably the number one rule DON’T give out your credit/debt card details to ANYONE unless you are 100% sure of their validity.

8.      Ask them for details of the company that you have secured the job with “without having an interview” then check this company out, normally they’ll be 100% legitimate companies so call them and ask to speak to the personnel department and ask them if they have even seen your CV.

Other more basic scams are the ones we all see every day, Earn £500 a week for 10 hours work, 99.9% of these so called “jobs” simply DO NOT produce anything like £500 a week, you’ll be lucky if you achieve a fiver, and again you’ve had to pay for the privilege of earning nothing like what these people promise.

Another one we’ve spotted much more in recent weeks is the get paid £100 a week to place adverts on Google, now this involves as far as we can see you doing the work for the scammers, they send you copy by email and expect you to visit 100’s of blogs and other websites to post junk links from which they get paid from the website owners for creating what’s called “one way” links which improves the websites in question Google search position.

These types of scams are bad in  more than one way, one they don’t ever seem to actually pay the people who do the scamming for them but they are earning ridiculous amounts of money from the website(s) they are advertising, and the other downside can be that your IP address is the one being used to do this scamming, so its you that runs the risk of being banned from using certain websites un till your IP address changes again, so many internet users don’t know what the IP address is so they are unaware of what they are doing when they are spending these hours posting these junk link.

This really isn’t the article to go in to the ins and outs of IP addresses so we’ll cover that one another time in more detail for you.

In conclusion the overall piece of advise we would want to offer you here is to constantly be aware and check and double check if you think it’s a bit to good to be true.

If your still not sure once you’ve done all your checks and you would like a fresh pair of eyes to have a look at it for you, then send as many details as possible to us at The Career Engineer and we will check it out for you for FREE and email or call you back with what we manage to find out.

Our web services team are experts in online tracking and it shouldn’t take us long to uncover a scam for you.

© The Career Enigineer
WoWMyCV.co.uk

        

Tags: career, Career Advice, Careers, Employment, fake employment, fake jobs, job scams, Job search, Jobs, scammers, Search Engines, Skills, Social Networking, Unemployment, work

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Articles, Career Engineer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.