Check out my latest article in Monday Magazine on the wierd world of online job hunting.
Oct 06 2009
Phish Food: Going down the rabbit hole of online job hunting
By Sheila Potter
The job ad on Victoria Craigslist was one-page long, detailed and professional, with modest, yet adequate pay. In short, there was nothing to flag it as a sleazy back-of-a-magazine, too-good-to-be-true scam. It wasn’t until I began my cover letter that I noticed there was no company name, no contact information and just a temporary Craigslist e-mail, which will disappear into the ether once this employer removes its ad.
I was baffled, having never seen an anonymous employer before. Was this a scam to collect my personal information? I fired a quick e-mail to a web savvy friend, Mike DeWolfe, who likes to track and blog about online scams.
“Are anonymous job ads on Craigslist legit?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” came his less-than-enthusiastic response. “I think these places don’t want to be pestered by applicants outside of the anonymous route.”
That does have a sound of truth. There were 11,500 Victorians looking for work this summer, and while the financial pundits say the recession is over, they also say jobless rates will lag any economic recovery. With that many people looking for work, some employers don’t want to be overwhelmed with phone calls and walk-ins, and so they use a temporary e-mail address. However, others are hiding their identity for other reasons.
Over the past year, DeWolfe found several online job ads in Victoria where the contact address corresponds to a group of mailboxes on Yates Street. He has used Google Street View to view company addresses that are empty lots, and he has found people claiming to be web designers that have no web pages. However, the job I was interested in had no information to track.
Recklessly, I decided to press send.
Wanted: gullible people
A few weeks after I applied for the job, I got an e-mail for an “employment offer for Purchasing Agent,” from a HR manager Mattias Olsson at Avent Soft Labs Inc., a company who claimed to focus on the “design, development, and support of operational and financial software applications for the oil and gas industry.”
After an ordinary list of requirements (“excellent communication and organizational skills,” etc.), was the following suspicious list of responsibilities: “receiving payments for the ordered software applications and consulting services . . . withdrawing the funds and transferring them further to our managers in one of the our branches.” Even worse, Olsson instructed me to use Western Union, an untraceable money transfer service.
A quick Google search reveals that my job offer is a common money-collecting/laundering scam, albeit in a new slick version, hidden in convincing human-resources speak.
A few weeks later, I received another job offer, this time to collect and resend parcels. According to a FBI website (the Internet Crime Complain Centre), these parcels will contain goods bought with fake credit cards—possibly in my name. The credit cards are obtained by collecting personal information from job applications and resumes. In short, I was phished for and targeted as a promising victim: an underemployed writer.
I haven’t been this demoralized since I got my bicycle stolen while voting for the Green party.
The recession has provided an opportunity for a new wave of online scams. The core scam remains the same and involves tricking people into sending personal information, credit card numbers, or money via Western Union or Moneygram. But the approach and the target is always changing according who is most vulnerable.
Last summer, it was fake apartment rental ads, where scammers posted photos of local houses they didn’t own and convinced students to pay online. This year, it’s fake job ads, preying on the new level of job seekers and the increasing trend towards online job classifieds.
Saanich Police warned that a man who responded to a seemingly local job ad for an administrative assistant in August received a fraudulent job offer similar to mine. And for those attracted to the bright shiny light of Twitter, the Victoria Better Business Bureau recently warned about EasyTweetProfits.com, a scheme that tricks people into making a small purchase for employment tips, which turns into large monthly VISA charges.
Jobs gems hide in scam dirt
It would be easier to ignore the scams if legitimate local companies were not also posting ads on such scammer-lurking grounds as Craigslist and UsedVictoria.com.
In a Wired article, “Why Craigslist is a Such a Mess,” writer Gary Wolf described Craigslist as outdated technically and full of spam and sleazy offers; yet it remains the largest, most comprehensive classified ad site around.
Locally, legitimate employers feel compelled to use it to get the most coverage. For instance, Rosalind Scott, the executive Director of the Victoria Better Business Bureau, recently hired four people exclusively through online ads, including Craigslist and Kijiji. She was swamped with over 1,000 resumes, yet the top candidates were outstanding, so she says she would go this route again. Of course, Scott’s job postings were not anonymous and she advises people to ignore anonymous ads. “If someone is being that surreptitious, I would be nervous about doing any further deals with them.”
However, BC Jobs Online’s president, Ryan St. Germaine, explains that there are some valid reasons why local companies hide their identity, which is why his website allows companies to remain confidential. (Unlike Craigslist, BC Jobs Online does some background checks on the company, especially if it is overseas.) “The main reason is that companies may be hiring to replace a position and they don’t want a person to know they are being replaced,” St. Germaine explains.
The next most common reason is that recruiting agencies want to keep their job sources secret from other recruiters, he says.
Don Barthel, systems manager for UsedVictoria.com, which also lists online employment ads, says the first line of defence is to watch for keywords—specifically the phrases “work at home” or “online jobs.” These, says Barthel, lead one of their moderators to put the ad on hold until it can be verified as legitimate or proven to be a scam. “Most of the time, the job poster replies back—and if they don’t, it’s usually a scam.”
I consulted with a group of job seekers on an international Craigslist forum who confirmed that some anonymous ads turn out to be posted by recruiters and these ads led to fruitful employment.
“One thing I noticed is that ads with numbers at the end—i.e. reference numbers—are from temp agencies,” wrote one forum visitor, who went by the handle of officeboyz.
“The majority, and I would put this at least at 95 percent, of those blind ads are scams. However, I have been contacted by two legit companies in the past three days from a blind ad,” wrote another job seeker.
Although these job seekers are pretty sure they have responded to scams, they did not know for sure, nor did they know what the scammers are doing with their resume information.
“This is an important
business matter“
Another strange thing started happening after I responded to the Craigslist ad. I started getting automated “robo-calls” that started with the phase, “This is an important business matter”—at which point I hung up, not interested in phone spam.
But then it occurred to me, I had given my phone number out on my resume. I did a quick Google search for “This is an important business matter,” and came up with a U.S. Better Business Bureau’s national alert about fake debt collectors.
People who returned the call were told they had an outstanding debt. The scamsters often claimed that they were lawyers with the power to arrest people the following day. They tried to scare and bully victims into “settling out of court” for $500 to $1,000, to be wired immediately.
The U.S. BBB reported that the scammers had a disconcerting amount of personal information to convince people they were real debt collectors, including home addresses, job contacts, employment history, personal and professional references and even social insurance numbers—in short, just the type of information you might collect off a resume. The U.S. BBB raised concerns of a “massive data breach,” but do not know where the data came from.
Nobody has yet linked the two scams: gathering information via resumes, then following up as a debt collector via phone.
If the two scams are related, the scale of the scam would have to be larger than a couple of guys with a computer. Welcome to the weird world of anonymous online outsourcing.
Automated and outsourced
Most freelancing writers, artists and web designers are probably familiar with sites like Elance.com and oDesk.com that invite freelancers to bid on telecommuting projects.
These sites are a good idea in theory, but they are suffering from their international jurisdiction-less nature. The winning bids are always at third-world rates. For instance, the going rate for writing 10 articles about the environment, at 250 words each, is about $1.
At that rate, it becomes cheap enough to hire people to do all sorts of strange things. Some people hire others to hit specific Google ads (thus generating ad revenue). Others pay people to comment on blogs and forums, in order to simulate an audience meant to attract real readers, a phenomena euphemistically called “seeding.” Others are “astroturfing,” the term given to faking a political grass roots movement. Still others are hiring people write fake online ads.
Consider this ad posted on GetACoder.com in the first week of September. The employer, known only as Jm1409, wants a firm that can write and post 800 to 1,000 unique, but generic, job ads a day. The applicant must be able to understand the “trigger words” that will lead browsers to “flag” ads as inappropriate, and how to avoid security. The applicant must generate 1,000 to 2,500 responses a day. Also, applicants must know about IP redirecting (to hide the location of computers).
There was a healthy competition for this job including a “professional team of 30+ CL [Craigslist] posters” led by someone named Davinder, his location not revealed. “We are doing postings in various sections of CL including Jobs section. We are doing 10,000 ads per day and have the infrastructure to do 15K per day.” Similar contracts request both Craigslist posting experience and call-centre infrastructure. It seems that someone is going to a lot of effort to misuse job ads.
However, when all is said and done, while the scammers may be astonishingly au courant with the latest technology, they still have trouble getting money out of most people. Remember, Google is your friend. By simply cutting and pasting any text from a job ad into a Google search, you can quickly find if the job is flagged in the hundreds of websites devoted to exposing scams and other dubious business ventures.
UsedVictoria.com’s Barthel also recommends job-seekers consider any offers carefully. “I would caution anybody from applying for a job where they don’t actually get to meet the person. If it’s ‘Show up at this hotel at this time for an interview,’ that’s a whole lot better than, ‘Send us a cheque and we’ll get you started.’ You shouldn’t have to send anyone any money for a job.”
As for those anonymous jobs, I could follow the advice from veteran online job seekers: send a cover letter rather than a resume until I am reassured the job is real. If I do not reveal personal or contact information (except for my e-mail), I should be spared everything but spam.
However, I’m going to follow the advice of the Better Business Bureau’s Rosalind Scott and ignore anonymous ads at the risk of bypassing a few real jobs. It seems like bad netiquette for employers to require job seekers to reveal personal information, while divulging nothing themselves, and do I really want a job with such an inconsiderate employer? Even in this tight job market, my answer is no.
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