During this pandemic when many people are unemployed, the number of fraudulent jobs have been increasing drastically. Taking advantage of this economic crisis brought on by the pandemic, scammers are targeting vulnerable people who are desperate to look for a job. Spotting fake job offers in a timely manner is extremely important. In this article, we will discuss the 3 main warning signs for fraudulent job offers to help you stay away from dangerous scams.

1. Suspicious deposits

When the company starts asking for a deposit at first, it’s time to put your guard on. It could be a small amount of money like the deposit for uniform or large sum for initial training or office stationery like laptops. In any cases, it is good to double check or delay the payment until you get the invoice.

Moreover, if the recruiter asks for your credit card details or detailed bank account information, it is an immediate red flag. Some even ask you to transfer some money to another account and receive a cheque in return. They could be stealing your money by giving a fake cheque, or even trying to do money laundering, which is against the law and may lead you to imprisonment.

2. Unprofessional emails

The most common one is that the representative contacting you uses a personal email address. These days, most of the legit organisations have managed to create their own email domain. Thus, if someone who claims to be the representative of a company trying to reach out to you but using a personal email, it is better to check the legitimacy of that person and the company first.

Secondly, real companies hire professionals who are able to write well. Some emails from scammers are well-written, but many are not. Usually they will contain numerous errors. The three most obvious and popular ones are capitalisation, punctuation and grammatical errors. Besides, misspellings are quite common in scam emails as well. It can be a typo or sometimes it is done on purpose. For example, the scammer may write “Proctor & Gambel” instead of “Procter & Gamble” to pretend to represent the real company.

3. Unclear information

Sometimes the job is too good to be true, especially those jobs with high salary, minimal hours and no formal interview required. However, when you ask for more details regarding the payment date or simply a quick look of the office, the scammers may not be able to resolve that. The situation becomes more difficult when the really good job offer is from a company abroad.

When little information is provided, a little due diligence on the job is fundamental. The first step would be to go through the website, social media platforms or LinkedIn page. Furthermore, using LinkedIn to check the current and past employees of the company and ask for their experience while working there is also a great idea. A quick search on Google with the keywords “scam”, “fraud”, or “false” along with the company name may give you some valuable information as well.

Summary

To sum up, fraudulent jobs are everywhere and we need to be alert all the time in order to protect ourselves. If something is too good to be true, it probably is. If you suspect something to be illegitimate, always investigate it in detail and report any scams that you come across.

 

About the author:

Article written by Trung Nguyen, Senior Consultant AIMS International Vietnam

AIMS VIETNAM