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FBI Warns Job Hunters Of Online Scams
Be extra careful when looking for work in cyberspace. The FBI is investigating some cases that involve fake job interviews and offers of employment that are actually ways to lure people into helping crime rings.
Job candidates should be cautious when seeking employment online, according to the FBI.
The FBI has released a warning, saying it is investigating several “online employment scams. The FBI outlined several schemes and told candidates to protect their information and be skeptical of some prospective employers.
Some of the cases under investigation involve fake job interviews or offers of employment that are actually ways to lure people into helping crime rings.
According to the warning, fake recruiters are pretending to do background checks or set up bank accounts for direct deposit. Instead of getting a job, the candidates become victims of identity theft or owners of empty bank accounts.
In other cases, job ads for correspondence managers or import/export specialists are ruses to get people to ship items ” purchased illegally online ” using stolen credit cards, to Nigeria and other places.
The FBI states that people should never pay upfront for any job opportunity and never provide identification or financial information to prospective employers. Job hunters should consider posting resumes anonymously, withholding personal information and using e-mail as a primary means of contact. The FBI also warns people to be wary of ads with misspellings, grammatical errors and terms like “money transfers,” “wiring funds” and “package forwarding.”
“Those are big clues that something is amiss,” the FBI warned in its prepared statement.
Authorities advise people who are scammed to immediately close all bank and e-mail accounts that could be jeopardized and contact all three credit bureaus to place fraud alerts on their files. They should also regularly monitor credit reports for signs of theft and report the fraud to the site that posted the scam as well as the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center.
New Internet scams can also be found on a fraud page. A private site, called LooksTooGoodToBeTrue provides similar alerts.
[...] Sometimes the ill effects of identity theft might be limited to piles of junk email in your inbox every day. However, some identity thieves go so far as to involve the candidate in a criminal enterprise. Take note of this warning from the FBI reported in this post from Emplyment Digest– “The FBI has released a warning, saying it is investigating several “online employment scams. The FBI outlined several schemes and told candidates to protect their information and be skeptical of some prospective employers. [...]