Jobhunters beware

This is the 4th time I have received a message like this. I diligently forward them to the fraud investigation departments of the various career sites, although I doubt it’s doing much good. The only real way to fight these vermin is to educate the masses… so here, get educated.

The message I received today is quoted in full below http://jonathanmurray.com/greymatter/archives/00000679.htm (click the link).

The thing that makes these particular bastards worse than your average mass-mail phishing scammer? They’re preying on people who are actively looking for jobs – potentially people who are in dire need of gainful employment, and willing to take a chance on something that sounds too good to be true. Folks, if it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is. Spam is spam, regardless of the source.

The FBI http://www.fbi.gov/cyber/cysweep/cysweep1.htm has a few things to say about this sort of scam, as do the http://www.spokane.bbb.org/alerts/alerts.html?newsid=644&newstype=1 Better Business Bereau and a http://www.google.com/custom?domains=jonathanmurray.com&q=payment+forwarding+scam&sa=Search&sitesearch=&client=pub-6616424773924529&forid=1&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%23CC0000%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV%3A%23808080%3BVLC%3AFFFFFF%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3A111111%3BLBGC%3A000000%3BALC%3ACC0000%3BLC%3ACC0000%3BT%3AEEEEEE%3BGFNT%3AAAAAAA%3BGIMP%3AAAAAAA%3BLH%3A50%3BLW%3A500%3BL%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fjonathanmurray.com%2Flogos%2Fbglogo-black.jpg%3BS%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fjonathanmurray.com%3BFORID%3A1%3B&hl=en number of http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119941,00.asp good, http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3730401&p1=0 informational sites.

For those too lazy to click through the links, here’s the brief version: An “International Company” offers you a job to forward payments and merchandise for them to avoid the “excessive delays” that banks and online payment services incur. (Note: Those delays are required to prevent fraud – that in itself is a key indicator of this scam.) The scam works like this: Merchandise is purchased with fake or stolen credit cards and sent to you – you’ve been given the “job” to repackage the merchandise and ship it overseas. When the seller or credit-card company discovers the fraud, they come looking for the person who received the items. You. Another component of this is money forwarding – an item is sold via the internet and you’re used as the intermediary. A large sum of money is wired to you, and you receive instructions to forward that money on to some third party. When the “sold” item is never received, you are now liable to return the money. The best one of all goes something like this: You’re sent a payment check for the fraudulent activity you’ve been unwittingly involved in above. The payment happens to be substantially more than you expected, so you’re told to wire back the difference. When the check bounces, the amount is deducted from your account, and the amount you “wired back” is now money stolen from you.

Sounds like fun, huh?

Good… now read the letter below, recognize it as a scam, and don’t fall for it, should you ever get a similar offer from one of these scumbags.

Update: Check out the http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2005-07-10-cyber-mules-cover_x.htm USATODAY article describing this activity.

Message quoted here in hopes of keeping you from making the mistake of thinking anything like this is legitimate. Please don’t be an idiot and try to contact these people.

Name of our company is AMG ” Australian Mediamarket Groups “
In connection with expansion of client base we collect new employees.

Company has been known in the Internet market for almost 4
years. Our company is
registered and located in Australia . We also have some offices in south –
east Europe.
For the first two years we basically
worked only with clients from Australia, Germany and Northern Korea . Later
gradually we managed to penetrate the world market in this sphere thanks
to professionals in the Internet technologies, computer graphics and
programming who work for us and are capable to execute complex corporate
orders and to facilitate the exclusive projects. We boast to have clients
in other countries. By May, 2004 60 % of all our orders were from clients
in the USA and Europe. After the penetration into the world market our
turnover increased several times, but at the same time we unfortunately
faced certain problems.

Popular online – payment systems, such as PayPal (www.paypal.com) and
similar ones, BidPay (www.auctionpayments.com), AmericanExpress payment
systems (www.americanexpress.com) and other electronic methods of payment
are not supported in some countries where payment systems and other
electronic methods of payment are not supported our offices opened.. We
had a problem with reception of payments from clients since we could not
support even the basic and most popular ways of payment. Even when a
client made a money transfer with a bank, we could get it from another
country only 10-15 days after and therefore our business was inevita! bly
ruined. Additionally several factors were against our business. It is not
a secret that for the last years the role of online banking has soared up,
and many clients would prefer to make money transfers not leaving their
house. Therefore bank details of a decent financial institution in a
civilized country were necessary for a successful company of our level
with good reputation, which was looking forward to find an opportunity to
use popular online payment methods which were not available to a citizen
We had to find a radically new approach to this
problem. The decision to find a financial representative in the USA was
made to solve a lot of problems due to payment methods. You, as the
citizen the USA can help us with these questions.

1. As we are going to entrust to you sufficient sums of money, we’ll
need some details to check and update the information. Please, send us by
e-mail or by fax a copy of your driver’s license (or other basic document).

After we get this information, our Manager-Representative will contact you and
give further instructions related to this work and will inform about the
date to start the work.

After filling the form which is lower, we shall send to you the contract.

VERY IMPORTANT!!! (It is necessary that you have received the answer to this letter)

I. Fill in the form (if this information is specified in your resume, then
please send it once again for confirmation):

Full name and surname:
The address :
City:
State/ province:
Post code:
Con tact phone number:
E-mail:

Our company is registered in 2001 and fully legal.
Here is our information.
Our Postal Address Is:
Financial Services Centre
PO Box 231
Civic Square Sydney
ACT AUSTRALIA 2608

Our Bank Details are:
Account Name: MARKET INTERMEDIARY
Account Number 25510683
BSB 056743
Swift; CTBAAU2S
Fax Australia 61-294-750-607

Regards,

” Australian Mediamarket Groups ”

2 Comments

  1. Sometimes things work out to make you feel like you’ve done something good. Today was one of those times.

    I just received this from Careerbuilder.com:

    "Dear Jonathan,

    Thank you for contacting Careerbuilder.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate you sending us this information.

    We are dedicated to removing fraudulent companies from our website and we rely on the help of our customers to do so. At this time, we have shutdown this employer’s account and terminated their ability to use any of the products and services on our website. In appropriate cases, we will also share information with the FBI, Secret Service, and local law enforcement agencies across the country to further combat this type of fraudulent activity.

    Thanks for your help! If you have any additional questions or comments, please let us know. We are available by email at csi@careerbuilder.com or by phone at 1-866-438-1485, 8:00 am to 9:00 pm Monday through Friday.

    Careerbuilder Site Integrity Team"

    Small victory, perhaps (not to mention temporary at best), but it still gives me some measure of satisfaction.

  2. Yup, they just phished me. Thanks for posting this information. I will forward the "phis-mail" on to career builder.com

    Eric

Comments are closed.