I Was ALMOST Scammed! Beware!
According to a report on Vanguard Newspaper, about 80 per cent of the jobs advertised online are fake. This is partly due to the fact that the internet is such a porous place, many fraudsters prey on unsuspecting jobseekers promising them jobs that don’t exist and because of the economic situation in the country, many job seekers are a little careless about which jobsite to patronize, causing them to fall into the wrong hands.
People tend to get fantasized by huge paying job vacancies through the Internet, advertisement hoardings and lot many ways. The real question is whether it is fake or true. And there are numerous job recruiting firms around the world with fancy advertisements which promises job with high pay scale and lot many benefits. It is tough to find whether it is true or fake. There are many fraudulence websites with fancy names throughout the Internet.
A job scam is something where the fraudulent group portrays themselves as a recruiter posting a good job offer with a huge pay scale. They try to loot huge amount of money by two methods. One method is they ask to pay some amount of money as an advance and another method is theft identity. In this they approach people with a resume from a job portal and try to get your confidential information and use it for theft identity.
Whatever methods the scammers approach, their main intention is to get a huge amount of money and escape. And nowadays, the fake recruiters use many tricky techniques which made it very difficult to identify the real one from the fake recruiter. As the job opening keeps increasing, more fake recruiters also have increased enormously. Out of ten job offers there is approximately only four legitimate opening and rest are fake openings posted by the fake recruiters.
I recently got back to the job market in a many years and posted my resume in numerous websites. I tell you, I got bunch of calls from recruiters with heavy Indian accent with recruiting company names that I never heard of! As far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with an accent, but most technical recruiters I had dealt with, tend to have English communication skills rival that of a car salesman (with no disrespect). Lol!
Some obviously have not even read my resume and some even asked some inappropriate questions like my ethnicity (even when my CV clearly indicates my nationality) or how long I have been living in Nigeria.
Many times I have encountered job seekers mostly females who tell me they are ready to do anything to get a good job. Few years ago a lady I never met before kept calling and offering to meet me in person despite telling her there was no need for that. Such persons are susceptible to being duped. When you appear desperate you becloud your judgment and make yourself an easy target for job scammers.
According to a victim, “They keep on forwarding messages in social media with an email address saying that all interested candidate should forward their CVs through this Email. [email protected].”
The victim who claimed anonymity went ahead to explain how the process works: “If you send your CV they will send you an application form for you to print out, fill and scan back to their email. Once you do that they will send you an interview form telling you that you are invited to attend an interview, and before going to the interview a sum of 10,600 Naira is required to be deposited into their account.”
However, there are so many licensed recruiters around the country but still a few unscrupulous ones go about looking for people to scam. When you apply for a job through the internet or get invited to interviews by an employer through CV Search, you can always report any organization that demands for any form of advance fee from you during the process before they will offer you a job.
The key is to never appear desperate for a job and never offer anybody money to get a job.
Be wise! Job scammers are getting smarter by the day. They continually find ways to send email and SMS invitations of job interviews to unsuspecting job seekers and then later on ask the same jobseekers for all sorts of fees (application fees, processing fees, etc) before they can offer the jobs to them. Most times these jobs are non-existent.
There are several ways to avoid fake jobs and recruitment scams and some of them include doing a thorough search on the hiring agency or organisation, visiting their websites to confirm if there are legitimate vacancies.
As the year runs to an end, PLEASE steer clear of organisations that use free email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo instead of corporate email accounts and avoid being too desperate to notice the tell tale signs of a recruitment scam.
Hope this help someone?