All Scammers go to hell!

Picture it.

The plains of Africa.

It’s the dry season and rivers aren’t flowing much. Water holes dot the landscape, and these become life for the animals that live in the region.

As the water supply shrinks, animals begin going to pools of water that still exist. For a predator, this is an opportunity made in heaven. They don’t have to go out prowling for food. They just have to wait for it to come to them.

In today’s world of looking for a job, sites like Linkedin, Indeed, Dice, CareerBuilder, and so on are our watering hole. We see lists of jobs we could be good for, apply for them, and wait. Most of the time, we never hear from these outfits again.

But sometimes we get lucky and we get an interview.

And then sometimes, we think lightning just struck only to realize someone is trying to con us.

Recently, that happened to me.

I’d found a job for a Systems Admin on Linkedin. I know the company and didn’t think twice about applying.

A day later, I get this Skills Questionnaire. None of it requested Personal Information and it was all pretty routine questions I’d ask anyone interviewing for an IT position. I filled it out, sent it back. As I filled it out, I’d looked at the address at the top. There was an alarm bell, but I didn’t think twice about it.

The next day, I get a job offer. I’m reading through it and then something caught me. “We will be sending you a certified check to establish your home office! What you don’t spend, send back to us.”

Big time Alarm Bells! Every outfit I ever worked remotely for just sent me a laptop, not a check to buy a ton of equipment.

I looked at the top of the attachment and it had the company logo and address, and that’s when I realized what had caused warning bells to go off.

The address said Brooklyn NY.

I knew the actual company was in Virgina.

And then I saw the zipcode. Six digits, not five and it wasn’t even close to Brooklyn’s list of zipcodes.

I looked up the address on Google Maps. It’s a city park.

Turns out that address is common for scammers. It’s on templates and is meant to be replaced with the actual address. Since the company I knew had been around since the 60s, it was reasonable to assume they’d had plenty of time to fix that detail.

I then checked the guy who would be my “Recruiter” at the company. Any legit recruiter will be on LinkedIn.

He wasn’t.

The final nail in the coffin was I did what we, in the IT biz call, a “whois lookup.” This is a very simple thing. Open Google, type in “whois lookup” and it will direct you to a site to check things out. It will give you things like who owns it and etc..

Now, if the email had come from and @gmail.com or @outlook.com address, I’d have spotted the scam right away. As it was, this turned out to be legitimate site. Someone had actually gone out and claimed the domain name. What they did was take a reputable company name and added the word careers to it. By having a site out there, they were hoping to make themselves look a little more legit.

The whois lookup pointed to an outfit in India.

What I was seeing was a couple of scams going here.

First, by sending me a certified check, and asking for anything I didn’t spend back, what I was running into was a variation on the Nigerian Prince. In this, someone claims that have to move money. They send you a certified check, you deposit it and then write another certified check that you send back to them. Days later, we discover the check they sent is trash, our account is now in the negative, and worse, they just made some money (they’ve already cashed the check you sent).

The other had I signed the job offer, I’d have seen a request for banking info next for my direct deposit. I give it to them, and they turn around and clean out my account.

So, if you’re like me and looking for your next big gig, best of luck to you.

But do be careful.

There’s lions, tigers, and bears out there.

And they’re hunting you.

Stay alert.