Protect Yourself and Report the Latest Frauds, Scams, Spams, Fakes, Identify Theft Hacks and Hoaxes
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Jobs websites in the U.S. and U.K. (and other countries) like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com can be an excellent, efficient way for job-seekers to find employers and learn about new job openings. Unfortunately, it also is being used by scammers to get your identity information or to scam you into an MLM sales pitch. There are also scammers creating fake job notifications that look like they came from Monster.com directly.
Have you received an email like the one below, claiming to be from (click on the links for examples of the scam emails):
These appear to be nothing more than the AFF (Advance Fee Fraud), a money transfer scam (see this page) targeting residents of the U.S. and Canada. We're currently investigating these. We noticed a pattern when our own staff started receiving them in the past week (mid-February 2007). We created a dummy resume with a fake contact address, phone and email that we set up to receive the response.
CFR RECOMMENDS THAT YOU DO NOT CONTACT THEM OR GIVE THEM ANY PERSONAL INFORMATION UNTIL WE CAN CONFIRM MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THEM!
Do you have a resume posted online? We'd like to hear from you about your experiences recruiting emails that turned out to be scams or misleading - click here to write us. We suspect these are possibly a new wave of identity theft attacks.
See this page for instructions on how to protect your identity while using Monster.com!
Let Monster.com know that you are not happy about the deluge of emails from this one company! We spoke with a Monster representative who advised that you forward the emails to siteabuse@monster.com
You can also try filing a complaint with Monster.com, by going to this page: http://my.monster.com/contactus.aspx and click on LiveChat - although they'll probably just tell you to forward the email to the address above.
Ever since posting my resume online with Monster.com, Careerbuilders.com and valleyjobfinder.com, I have consistantly received many "letters of interest" from individuals or businesses either running scams or phishing for personal information.
However, one measure that I always take is to research the company or individual that sent me the offending e-mail before following any included links or offering any sort of personal information.
To date I have received approximately 45 such e-mails, and discovered that ALL of them were either various scams or have various complaints filed against them with the BBB.
I would like to personally thank you and members of this site as much of the information regarding these shady operations were exposed and made available to individuals such as myself on this site; thus giving me the tools needed to avoid unscrupulous "offers" and focusing my efforts on legitimate employment contacts.
Wade
There are a variety of sleazy scams that look, at first glance, like legitimate job offers. Before you write back to them, pause a moment and read about the scams below!
Some of the more common job scams are