Recently I have been in an aggressive job search and there are some interesting experiences I have come about. I thought these experiences will serve a greater purpose if I share it with others. After all any smart person would learn from other people's experience.
In my job search I have come about many fake job offer letters. The intension of these letters is usually to take away money or identity theft. None of the fake job offer letters were able to take away money from my pocket, but I have wasted a lot of time reading the details of these job offers. I believe that even wasting our valuable time on these things in itself is a great loss. My intention here is to give tools to people so that as soon as they receive a suspicious offer letter they can compare the letter and be sure that it is fake or real. I have learned many of the points by wasting my own time. So I hope that my effort here will help people not to waste their time.
- Check out their email id
The quickest and fool proof method to hit the nail on a fake offer letter is by checking their email id. The domain names from which the email has been sent tends to be a bit shady. For example, let there be a company named ABC Inc. which is a genuine company. Now if ABC Inc. sends emails to job-seekers it will be from an @abc.com or @abc.org or @abc.net, etc email address. A reputed company will never use email services of Gmail or Yahoo Mail or Hotmail to send job offers to candidates (no matter how convincing it sounds, like abc_recruitment_drive@yahoo.com, it is fake). The scamers have evolved over time and become smarter at their trade. They have replaced domain names like @gmail.com or @yahoo.com etc with more good looking domain names like @techie.com which seem more genuine. In such instances just google the domain name from @ and search result will show you if it is a scam or not.
2.Job offer letters without interviews
Once you receive a job offer letter without attending any interview be sure to raise your alert. No company or owner of a company will want to take a person into their company with the strength of only your resume. However compelling your resume be you will be invited for a face to face interview atleast on skype.
3.High salary compared to your experience
All of the fraud job offers will have a very high salary which is more than your experience will get paid for. Getting a high salary without an interview to even evaluating your abilities in itself cries out loud fraud.
4.Look out for money to be paid
All the fraudsters ultimately do what they do not for their daily bread and butter. So all fraud job offers will have an amount to be paid. The deadline for the amount to be paid will in most cases be very short. This is done so that we may not have the time to make a better judgement. No reputed company will ask for money for recruiting you to their company whatsoever the reason.
5.Just Google search the company name
If you find a company you have not heard before just google it. A good company will have a good online presence with an established website. But this alone is not be taken as the criteria. Scammers are now even building good websites. Search the company name along woth the word scam, fraud etc so that it will bring out posts others have reported.
6.Grammatical mistakes
Many of the scammers are from non English seaking countries in Africa. They do not have a good English. So even if their first mail may be better scripted once we ask them casual questions we will may start noticing significant errors in their English.
So I have given you the tools to check your job offer letter. So how do you use it. When you get a job offer letter which you are not expecting is enough sign to raise your alert. Now search for the numerical in the letter without reading it. You have the possibility to find two numerical, one is the salary and the other will be the amount you have to pay. Compare the email domain name and the company name. Keeping all the tools in mind and using the procedures mentioned above will help you to crack a fraud offer letter within minutes.
So what do we do if we recognise a fraud job offer letter. Our impulse would be to send back abuses back due to our frustration of wasting time on it. But this would be the wrong thing to do as this would help the spammer to recognise that our email id is active and real and they may target us in the future for their next trick. The best thing to do would be to press the report spam button. If enough number of people press the spam button, google will automatically send any email sent from it automatically to the spam folder without wasting our time.
I was not aware of many of the above tools so I had to waste my time on some of the letters. A mere awareness of these points will help you to save a lot of time and money. I hope this article will be useful to many and my time has not gone in vain. Information dispels myths.I have done my part to help out my connections, wish that everyone who reads do the same. I am open to discussions. So please contribute to the article if I have missed any points.
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