Yesterday I decided to catch up with what’s happening at the Airstream Life Tour Site. Hey there Rich!
It’s funny, his recent posts relate to the hunt for a house, transition to a home life from a full-timing life style. In the meantime, my thoughts have been focused heavily on a job hunt in an area I like. Two different blogs and bloggers, and both places evolving. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll both continue documenting fun places to visit as well. But hey, everything evolves.
Now I’m going to shift gears, because I’m steamed this morning. The job hunt brings out some interesting items, and I think I should warn people about another “quasi-scam”.
Great Work from home opportunity
There are several “web development” companies out there trolling for new employees. At least that’s what they’ll have you believe. The intro letter sounds extremely interesting, nearly perfect. Amazingly enough, many of these companies send out the SAME EXACT LETTER. I’ll give you an excerpt here…..
Our tech department involves working as a team to constantly maintain and upgrade our website. The majority of our Programmers/ Website Developers work from home maintaining contact by telephone, e-mail, and instant messaging.
We offer our Website Developers the following:
Highly competitive salary
Bonus plan that can add 25% or more to Base Salary
Medical, Dental, and Vision plan
Expense Account
Paid Vacation
Tuition Reimbursement
Rapid Fast Track Advancement Program
I’ve gotten letters from 3 different web sites with this exact phrasing. To a T. Nothing deviates at all. So, I checked out one of the sites.
A potential candidate needs to fill out their little intial application. Want to see what it looks like? Here’s a screenshot.
Now, let me show you a screenshot from another supposed company looking for employee’s as well:
So, do these look similar? Gee, I wonder if these two companies work together. The examples are from TooSpoiled and Worldvoice. I’m not giving their full information, they don’t need any more visits if you ask me.
If you ever stumble across a site offering jobs with a screen like this, use an e-mail address you don’t mind receiving spam at. The tip off is the bottom of this fraudulent application. Would you like to hear about educational opportunities. That gets you on a mailing list for offers from online schools, etc.
Once you submit the application it gets even better. You’re suddenly offered discounted services as a bonus for being an applicant at their site. Alright gang, let’s rephrase. They’re now allowing you to sign up for offers from their advertisers.
Looking through these sites, they claim to offer some service or other. But taking a closer look at the site….. they’re nothing but an ad service. Their money is clearly made by hooking up their users with advertisers. And getting new “applicants” to scroll through 7 service offerings sure helps them get a few dollars more!
I tried one of these applications with a junk e-mail address I use at hotmail. The second question I was asked after completing the application was about how I paid for college. Have you ever had an employer ask this? No, not normally. Of course real employers aren’t selling your information to loan consolidation companies……..
So, watch out for these types of things if you’re searching the web for tech jobs. These guys are out there. While not a 419 scammer, I don’t have any more respect for these folks than those.
Later I’ll tell you about how you too can have your resume spammed to corporations across our fruited plains.
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Good catch Rich. One of the big tip-offs to scam emails is the offer to “work at home”. Lots of people want to work at home and so the sleazeballs always put that in their emails.
No one will get past you, Rich. You will know what place will catch your brain waves.
Rich,
Yeah, these places are sleezy. Looking into them further I’m finding many of these places are tied together, with a few select individuals running all these sites.
One particular site, toospoiled, is getting horrible press. Referred to as a scam site over and over. Their reaction is that the sites complaining about them are hate sites trying to tear them down. Uh, you’ve got to be kidding. Clearly they’re barely above board. I don’t hate them, just came across them yesterday, and I can tell you, not legit at all.
[...] I received yet another scam job offer like the ones I’d noted before. Click this link if you need to refresh your memory. The letter I received is almost exactly the same as several [...]