Fake job offers
Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a number of emails regarding fake job offers and other job search scams that abound on the Internet these days.
Several guys from India emailed me regarding emails they’d received – independently of each other – where a company they’d never applied to had offered them a job or interview and they weren’t sure what to do about it.
Certainly, getting an unsolicited email from a company you’ve never applied to seems to good to be true (and it usually is) but when you’re looking for a job, sometimes any news is good news and perhaps their heart was telling them to go for it even if their head was telling them to delete the email and forget about it.
The thing that these fake job offers all had in common was that they were all sent to people in one country offering them a job in another country. Certainly if you’re in another country it can be difficult to quickly determine if a particular foreign country really exists or not.
Having said that there are many resources on the Internet alone that can help. Doing a quick Google search on the name of the company that was offering the alleged job quickly told me it was a scam so I passed this info onto the disappointed guys who’d emailed me regarding the company.
How can you tell which emails and correspondence is real and fake these days?
First off, common sense has to prevail. Companies you’ve never applied to don’t suddenly email you with a job offer or interview! It simply doesn’t work that way in life.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to avoid getting sucked in by a scam:
1. Is the company contacting you asking for money for any reason? This is a simple, first sign of a scam. If they’re asking for money, bank account info, etc this is obviously a scam.
2. Does the company have a website and legitimate contact info? Or do they simply send you an email with no contact info and a PO box instead of a real address? They probably won’t include a phone number otherwise you could call them and see if anyone answers. Mind you even if someone does answer and pretends to be from the company in question, it still doesn’t mean it isn’t a scam!
3. When you Google search the company name, what do you find? Often, this will immediately give you the answer you’re looking for. In the case of the company that I was asked about above by the Indian job searchers, when I Googled the company name, the first search result was a Yahoo! Answers result where someone who had also been contacted by this company asked “is this a real job” and a poster from the UK where the company was allegedly located said “no, it’s a popular scam in the UK.”
Life is hard enough without convincing yourself that nameless, faceless people are going to email you out of the blue offering you a job you’ve never applied for. Putting your faith, time, effort and money into situations like this will only serve to waste your time and money and lead to disappointment.
