I was forwarded a copy of this spurious Job Offer Letter recently and could not believe how people can still be gullible enough to fall for it either out of ignorance, naivety or sheer greed. Of course, I have no comment to make on the above hypothetical reasons.
But seriously, wouldn’t anyone’s suspicions be raised when they see such an amateurish work purportedly issued by one of the biggest companies in the world? Only two words come to mind: JUNK and SCAM.
At the very list, just do a Google search for the company and you’ll see that it never refers to itself as the “Petronas Oil Company of Malaysia”.
Number two, scam companies will only use mobile telephone numbers. Of course, it will be argued that the overseas scammed job seeker cannot tell the difference between a corporate number or a mobile number. Possible solution: go check the corporate website and see whether or not any corporate telephone numbers are given too. If you are going to invest some money calling overseas, you may as well pay it safe by calling the number listed on the corporate website.
Thirdly, scammers will eventually be asking their victims to pay some fees upfront to secure them their travel documents. It’s not explicitly stated in this letter yet but rest assured, it’s coming next.
When the victim contacts the so-called travel agency, many demands will be made on them. The people at the spurious travel agency will break them down psychologically until they pay up the fees.
Besides, there are so many other things seriously wrong about this scam letter. Even without going into more details of the scam process, I’d be very surprised if Petronas actually allows their corporate letters to be full of grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, different typefaces, fonts and least of all, be so colourful. The scam letter reeks so much of suspicion that I would immediately be put on my guard.