Author: Josh Hendrickson / Source: How-To Geek
Fake recruiters are catfishing desperate job-seekers, seducing them with the promise of a high-paying job before stealing their money and identity. We recently posed as a gullible recruit and let a scammer sucker us so we could learn their tricks.
Fake Recruiters Are Impersonating Real People
Here’s why this scam is so smart: Fake recruiters are impersonating legitimate people at real companies. When the person contacts you, everything appears real—a real company with a real website and a real person’s name and photo that appears in that company’s directory of employees. The scammer links you to the company’s real website and a real LinkedIn profile that seems to match the person to whom you’re talking.
But it’s a trick. The person you’re talking to isn’t who they claim to be. You’re talking to a scammer pretending to be a real employee.
Here’s How the Scam Starts
Fake job recruiters don’t just contact you out of nowhere. These scammers contact people who’ve posted resumes online looking for a job. The scammer offers a sweet work-from-home job, which could be very tempting to someone who’s having trouble finding work. The scammer poses as a “recruiter” for a real company, so it kind of makes sense that the email isn’t from the company’s regular email accounts.
We know someone who was contacted by one of these scammers, so we sent over a fake resume to see how they’d try to take advantage of an eager job seeker.
The “recruiter” was happy to get our fake resume and quickly directed us to talk to someone on Google Hangouts—in text chat and not video chat, of course. With a quick bit of internet sleuthing, we discovered the person’s name and profile picture matched a real person on the company’s website and LinkedIn. The person even directed us to that company’s website so we could “familiarize ourselves with the company.”
That company—which we’ve contacted, but won’t name here—is also a victim of the scam. This particular company is the perfect mark, as we had great difficulties reaching someone at the company to warn them they were part of this elaborate scam. A victim of the scam wouldn’t quickly be able to check that the company wasn’t hiring through Google Hangouts, either.
A Job Interview With a Real Fake Person
Our naive young job seeker (let’s call him John) couldn’t believe his luck! The company offered John a variety of positions from Customer Service and Data Entry Clerk to Accounting Executive. Despite his resume with a background in IT, he applied for a customer service position. We provided different information than we used on the resume—the scammer obviously hadn’t bothered to read it.
The interview just kept getting better and better. The job is a work from home position that paid $40 an hour—full time with benefits! The only drawback was that that the training period only paid $20 an hour—oh, and that the whole thing was a scam.
We were totally on board at this point—well, for the sake of the exercise—but the scammer actually apologized for looking scammy:
i (sic) would like to apprise to (sic) you that we are sorry about our unseemly approach if this interview conducting method is unprofessional to you or if you are new to all this, but i (sic) believe the world is always advancing so it is important to stay on top of things as change is inevitable.
Sounds legit to us!
John’s multi-hour interview began with questions about job history, career goals, what bank he uses, and how long he’d been with the bank. Completely standard questions that you’d expect in any job interview, right? John’s answers to these questions were somehow “scored,” and he netted a score of 86.23%.
Our intrepid young job seeker had mixed feelings at this point. On the one hand, he clearly aced that interview and deserved no less than 96%—with 4 points taken off for refusing to provide job references. On the other hand, he’d already received a promotion! After all, he applied for customer service and now had a position in Project Management.
The Interview Was Coming From Nigeria
John was now hired at this totally legitimate company and ready to begin work! To move forward, John would need to sign an employee offer letter, provide a picture of his passport, and send the IMEI and serial number of his smartphone. That sent us into a scramble—while preparing to be duped, we didn’t anticipate a request for a passport or an IMEI number. Identification makes some amount of sense, but why would any job need an IMEI number?
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