Avoiding job scams

Scam. The very word spells danger, unease, regret among people who have fallen victims to scam artists. Everytime I hear this word, I keep thinking about the illegal pyramid schemes that cheat people out of their money. I also keep thinking about the infamous Nigerian email scams that somehow continue to con gullible people worldwide to part with their money.

But scams do not only target people who think there is an easy way to invest money without putting in their fair share of due dilligence work.

No, scams also take advantage of unsuspecting people who are out there looking for a living. Jobseekers, especially, should be careful of the occasional employment scams that target vulnerable people who are looking for a job. The basic way these job scams work is very simple:

First, there will be an advertisement in the newspapers or on websites that offers interested candidates a job.

Second, candidates that answer the job advertisement will be called and told to pay a fee or deposit in order to have their applications processed.

It is at this point that candidates suddenly realize, after having paid this fee or deposit, that they do not hear any more from this company. Effectively, the jobseekers have fallen for a simple job scam.

Recently, you may have read in the newspapers that the stakes in employment scams have been raised a notch higher and unsuspecting jobseekers who fell for them have lost substantial sums of money, some more than RM100,000.

According to a New Straits Times story (25 Jan 2007), there had been advertisements offering good salaries for Administrative Executive positions. The job offer comes with a five-day training in forex trading after which those “successful” candidates are asked to deposit RM80,000 into an overseas account for forex trading. After a few weeks, the new employee is told to deposit more money to cover shortfalls in the forex trade. And these shortfalls attract hefty interest charges which continue to eat into the deposits. Soon, there is nothing left in the account. The newspaper went on to say that 10 people who had reported this scam to the National Consumer Complaints Centre had lost a total of RM1.5 million.

This is by far one of the largest scams that have been unearthed by the newspapers. It may actually be just the tip of the iceberg and it is very unfortunate that there are unsuspecting people who fall for them all the time.

How can you protect yourself against such scams that come disguised as job advertisements? Well, it is a matter of practising personal good judgment and being careful when you come across job advertisements that fall into these two main categories:

  1. Advertisements that ask you to pay a fee or deposit in order to process your job application;
  2. Advertisements that promote pyramid selling or some other similar schemes.

A real job advertisement will never ask you to pay any money (some asking for an outrageously large amount like in the scam story above) whether by calling it be processing fee or training fee. A real job advertisement will also not ask you to make a purchase of any kind in order to obtain the job. So, be careful with your hard-earned money. Moreover, a real job advertisement will not make you offers that are inconsistent with the job advertised. Finally, a real job advertisement will never originate from a public, web-based email address such as Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc, or ask you to reply to one.

As a responsible corporate citizen, JobStreet.com will endeavour to ensure that all advertisements on our websites are for real job opportunities only. It is part of our process to remove job advertisements that look dubious.

There may be the odd times when illegal advertisements sometimes do slip in unnoticed. If you do see them, you can help us by reporting these questionable job advertisements to policy@jobstreet.com, giving us the Company Name and the Position Title.

If you want to know more about JobStreet.com’s stand, please check out our Guide to Making Job Searches Safely.

About the writer
Quah Seng-Sun is the Content Manager at JobStreet.com, a leading on-line recruitment company in the Asia-Pacific region. This article may appear in a slightly different format in the JobStreet.com webiste.

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5 Responses to Avoiding job scams

  1. says:

    Watch Out!

    In toronto I lost a good day being lied to by these artists posing as a company with many jobs in different departments. They actuallly waste their own time by talking to you about the energy industry and then after all is said and done send you a a wild goose chase hustling by canvassing with no base comission, car etc. Their website is:

    http://www.universalenergy.ca/

  2. says:

    Thanks for the heads up. I am still in paper trading at the moment, and am compiling a forex ebook, detailing my findings.

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