Searching for Jobs, Finding Scams
Beware Money Laundering Schemes on Career Web Sites
Mitch Lipka
Special to Consumer Reports WebWatch
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Here’s a job opportunity: Work for an international charity that helps children suffering from the long-term medical and financial aftereffects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. If you can forward cash donations to someone in another country after skimming 7 percent off the top for yourself, this job could be yours.
Not only is that job – which was posted on smaller job sites and a variety of Internet forums – illegal, but the folks behind the ad were not actually affiliated with the legitimate charity, according to officials at the Chernobyl Children’s Project. Ads soliciting job candidates for the fake organization are still popping up on a variety of Web forums asking applicants to e-mail jennie@childdream.org. To further complicate matters, the phony charity replicated the legitimate outfit’s Web pages to give the appearance of authenticity to job seekers.
“When you’re doing business on the Internet, you make sure you do everything you can to have full disclosure,” said Kathy Ryan, executive director of Chernobyl Children's Project. “This type of thing takes away from that.”
The Chernobyl Children’s Project said it has contacted the New York State Attorney General’s office and the FBI. An e-mail sent by Consumer Reports WebWatch to the site branded a fraud by the real charity did not get an immediate response.
Sophisticated Scams Lure Eager Job Seekers
It has never been easier to look for a job than on your PC in the privacy of your own home. Advertisements for jobs real and fake also have a broader forum with the Web, which provides a new opportunity for people looking to take advantage of those seeking work.
Over the past year and a half, jobs scams have “mushroomed,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum and author of the 2004 report, “A Year in the Life of an Online Job Scam.” Not only have the scams found a new forum, she said, they are no longer run by amateurs hoping to squeeze a quick buck from unsuspecting dupes.
Dixon described one variation of an online employment ad scheme: An applicant responds to a phony ad, often in the accounting or finance field, and later the scammer usually conducts an interview by e-mail. Eventually, the potential victim is asked for bank account information, supposedly to set up direct deposit of paychecks. The scammer then steals money from the applicant’s account and transfers it to another account to buy items from online merchants, while another victim receives some of the transferred funds and wires the rest overseas. By making that transfer, “employees” are forwarding stolen money and participating in theft.
One job hunter was arrested last year after she was found to have used her bank account as a conduit for taking payment for fictitious merchandise sold in online auctions and sending the money out of the country, Dixon said. The charges were later dropped against the employee, who said she did not know the transactions were illegal.
“Really smart people get sucked into these [scams],” Dixon said. “It’s real hard to convince someone who has been out of work for a year that this bee with a honey pot might have a stinger at the end.”
Detecting Red Flags
While the red flags of a scam may seem clear to an objective observer from a distance – such as giving out personal bank information or sending a scanned image of your driver’s license – it isn’t quite so obvious for many job-seekers, particularly those who have been looking without luck for a long time. Scammers also are more sophisticated than ever before.
"There are some [scammers] that do mirror actual, legitimate [companies] so closely there will literally be one digit different in a phone number or zip code,” said Michele Pearl, a Monster.com vice president who leads that site’s anti-fraud efforts.
Scammers have gotten increasingly more sophisticated over the past year, Pearl said. Between 10 and 100 scam postings are attempted in any given week on Monster, she said, with about 10 percent of those making it online before ultimately being discovered and removed. The scam ads, which often ask if job seekers have PayPal accounts or seek bank account information, are often imitated by others if they make it past Monster’s filters, Pearl said.
At Monster, Pearl said the company forwards scams it catches to the FBI and the Internet Crime Complaint Center, but she doesn’t know of any fraudsters that have been prosecuted. Most of the perpetrators live overseas, she was told, often in Eastern European nations unwilling to cooperate in these white-collar investigations.
While some of the most popular job sites have gotten more aggressive in trying to filter the crooked ads from the straight ones, the volume alone – ads come in by the tens of thousands – can pose a problem in catching them. (See Sidebar: ‘Business Opportunities’ vs. Job Ads.)
Posted job scams are just part of the problem. The other – one that Dixon finds particularly problematic – is workers at companies with legitimate access to their sites’ online résumé bank pilfering posted personal data and selling it to identity thieves.
Employment-related fraud accounted for 13 percent of all reported cases of identity theft in 2004, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, making it one of the most common forms of identity theft.
To avoid personal information falling into the wrong hands, consumers should post résumés anonymously. And, Dixon suggests, job sites should continue to improve their attack on fraudulent ads and, ultimately, retain their credibility.
"Once the job seekers’ trust in these sites is gone, it won’t come back,” she said.
Sidebar: 'Business Opportunities' vs. Job Ads
An entire class of potentially fraudulent business opportunities is banned on some sites, such as Yahoo’s HotJobs.com. Business opportunities, which typically suggest a range of potential earnings from $1,000 to $10,000 a month, generally require up-front payment to buy into a “system.” (See the Consumer Reports Web Watch report, “Get Paid to Read This Column! Beware Big Promises by Online ‘Work-at-Home’ Schemes.”)
With more than 14,000 complaints lodged, work-at-home and business opportunity offers placed among the top 10 categories in the federal government’s Consumer Sentinel and Identity Theft Data Clearinghouse 2004 fraud trends report.
Paying up front for any job opportunity should always raise a red flag. But such ads are easily found. “Tired of working career-track bookkeeper, financial controller, or accounting technician jobs? Sick of sitting in your cubicle, staring at a computer screen all day and hating the view? Think about this - If you found a way to add $1,000 to your income every month by working a few extra hours part time each week, would you do what it took to make it happen?” reads an ad posted on CareerBuilder.com on Feb. 17.
[Disclosure: CareerBuilder is owned by newspaper companies Knight Ridder, Gannett and the Tribune Company. Knight Ridder owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, the newspaper for which this writer is an employee. The Knight Foundation funds Consumer Reports WebWatch.]
When appearing on Monster, these ads typically bear a disclaimer noting they are business opportunities, not job postings. CareerBuilder runs a standard disclaimer beneath each job listing warning against the dangers of giving out personal information, but the site does not have a specific warning regarding business opportunities.
Monster has placed limits on business opportunities that can be advertised and requires the following: Conspicuous disclosure of the cost of participating in business opportunities; contact information for purchasers; and unconditional refunds for unhappy participants.
“Because we've become more and more stringent on our rules, we've seen a drastic decrease in job postings in this area,” said Michelle Pearl, a Monster.com vice president who leads that site’s anti-fraud efforts.
Sidebar: Tips for Safe Online Job Seeking
- Do not post personal information – including Social Security Numbers, birthdates, bank account numbers – on your résumé online. .
- Do not give your bank account or credit card information to a potential employer, even if he or she requests this information for the stated purpose of depositing your paycheck into your account electronically. Legitimate employers will offer another way for you to be paid, such as via traditional paper paycheck.
- Do not e-mail a scan of your driver’s license or reveal any physical descriptions about yourself.
- Never pay up front for any job opportunity. You should not have to invest your own money to make money with a job.
- Be wary of ads seeking an “import/export specialist,” “marketing manager,” or “financial manager,” says the Better Business Bureau. These job titles have been linked to scams in the past.
- Be cautious of ads hawking business opportunities in the vending machine, pay phone, medical billing and work-from-home arenas, says the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
- If you suspect you’ve encountered a fraudulent job ad online, report it to the FTC, at 877-382-4357.
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Mitch Lipka is a staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Before joining the Inquirer he was a consumer writer/columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. Previously, he worked for Gannett Newspapers in Westchester County, N.Y., the former Anchorage Times and several other papers around the country. He has appeared on CNN, The Learning Channel and other broadcast outlets. He has written extensively on consumer product safety and scams.
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