Sadly, my daughter got scammed earlier this year. She is a recent college grad from a liberal arts school, and had been working six months doing retail work after graduation.
Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise.
She not only lost $3000 from the scam check, she also lost her old job, having given two weeks notice and didn't realize it was a scam until she was gone. The thing that pained her the most was the shame of having been scammed.
Although some red flags were there, her main blind spot was the disbelief that scammers would go to so much effort to (a) set up an entire website for the fake company, (b) were willing to spend hours in the fake interview, and (c) having her do two weeks of "training" courses while they waited for the laptop and other things she bought made it it cross country into their hands.
At least your daughter went through a full interview, which does add a layer of legitimacy.
The most shocking element of OP's story is that he never actually got interviewed by a real person. He filled out a questionaire, received no feedback from it other than "You're hired at 12.5% more than you're asking". This to me is the biggest red flag of all leading up to the actual "ask" to cash the check and send funds.
It seems odd to get a job for $90k /yr without ever meeting someone from the company. Even if that actually wasn't a scam, I would avoid taking a job for a company like that. How good are your co-workers going to be if they are just hired based on a text-based questionaire and a prayer?
There's also some mental concept where people already got started or went so far, and subconsciously don't want to believe they've been had, so keep going. I'm sure there's a name for it, I can't be bothered to look up. It's why romance scams are so common, and also why that McDonald's manager undressed that employee, for example. Fascinating, but sad.
I hope you let her know that she shouldn't be ashamed. These people take advantage of the good nature of others. It's also something they work at every day to improve their ability to take advantage of others, fix the mistakes that caused the last con to fail so that the next person will be at an even greater disadvantage. Learn the lesson & move on.
> The thing that pained her the most was the shame of having been scammed.
I've fallen victim to a scammer as well (paid rent to a "landlord" who it turns out didn't actually own the place). It sucks, but I don't think it's something to be ashamed of. Our society is built on trust, and some people exploit that.
For everything before the training courses, I was like "Eh, I could see it" but after that, it's pretty clear that it really did feel like a real job. At about that same age, I was pretty desperate for a decent job and I could totally see at least being very, very tempted to fall for it, too. I'd of course like to think I'd never fall for that, but you don't know until it happens to you.
I understand, I had that same belief. My thoughts were that faking checks and money is dangerous and stupidly hard, and since jobs pay you, the idea that it was a scam never came to my mind until way later when I was asked to wire...
There is no punishment that I would not hand down as a juror for people who exploit the trust of good people and poison society. Very literally, no punishment I would veto as too harsh.
My wife almost got taken by a similar scam very recently, but for a remote content editor position. She was applying for various jobs, but one she didn't apply reached out to her. As she had been looking for a little while, but only finding opportunities that didn't quite fit what she needed in terms of pay, hours and schedule flexibility - when she was offered a position that checked all the boxes she was ecstatic.
I'll spare the full back and forth, but the scam was somewhat similar in the setup. The send you a check, but instead of you wiring it back to them, you use the funds to purchase your remote equipment from THEIR online store. They have specific requirements on what kind of setup you need and claim it's easier for you to buy it from them in a bundle.
I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the correspondence between her and the "employer", but once she told me that I knew it wasn't legit. Why wouldn't they just send you equipment instead of check to buy it from them? We played along for a little bit longer, mostly because she wanted to believe it was legitimate and her pride was hurt. When they asked her to print a check from an email and then deposit that with her mobile app, she saw the writing on the wall.
She was very, very hurt and felt silly having to go back to friends and family and let them know she wasn't gainfully employed, after all. But thankfully we figured it out before we were out any money.
Content producer/editor here. Had a similar experience but they wanted me to sign up for all this stuff to begin the application process, as well as asked for a LOT of personal info.
They have my drivers license which contains a lot personal information but eh... proably somewhere based in india or something, I dunno.
Freeze your credit reports with all 3 credit reporting companies. Last year someone flew into Seattle from out of state with a driver license with their photo but my info, including an old driver license number. They got a bunch of cell phones and attempted to open a number of store credit cards with it. They bought a car with a fake of someone else's https://bellevuebeatblog.com/2021/04/28/64000-dodge-challeng...
You know it's fake because the company hasn't made you sit through 6 interviews with random panel guests then ghosted you for 3
month then low balled you and put a 24 hour expiry on the offer. Bonus credibility points for only giving half of the question during the whiteboard session only to casually remember remember at the very end while grading harshly for missing that.
If the offer hasn't been rescinded at least once it's probably a red flag as well.
As someone who has worked a corporate job for a while, this is all red flags _BUT_ if you have not worked for a corporation, and you really need a job, you may be motivated to dismiss those little warning signs so you can get paid.
Scams don't work because scammers are smart; scams work because scammers exploit our motivations. Beware of charity scams this holiday season.
I've worked at corporate jobs and smaller companies, and frankly if a large company said "here's a list of our authorised resellers, and a signing bonus paid by cheque, please use it to buy equipment as it's faster than going through procurement" I would 100% believe them as at every job I've ever had (before I got a company card) it was faster and easier to just buy and expense. I genuinely wouldn't bat an eyelid until it was too late.
To be honest, one can easily realize that this "Marc Cannon" is a fake with the amount of spelling and grammatical errors he makes. Real professionals do not make spelling and grammar errors such as:
"Do you have any other question ?"
"Good morning how are you this morning."
"I will send you later"
"Good morning, How are you doing today ?"
"This is very disrespectful and all director are to meet you for training on monday and you're 'suppose' to have all your materials before then"
It was practically a dead giveaway when the guy used "[email protected]", because the guy doesn't have access to the domain's email, he probably didn't even understand what you were saying.
Great job figuring out it was a scam but honestly, it’s crazy that these things still work on anyone all the way in 2022. You would think that by now every human being that walks the earth would know that whenever someone you don’t know sends you “money” and then requests you send it back (or to another party) in a different form, it’s always a scam. There should be some ceremony whenever someone turns 16 or something, where you just get taught this and that’s the end of this scam. Insane that people still fall for this!
Same for the gift card scams. No legit business or government on earth in any industry asks for gift cards as payment! This is like an absolute ironclad fact of the universe. But so many people still fall for it!
This post seem to blame victims for the problem, and that is not fair. People can be in dark places mentally, struggle with disease, family issues, etc. Not everybody is mentally sharp 100% of the time to identify a scam attack and fight it back.
The problem is not victims, the problem is scammers. There should be better mechanisms to quickly clamp down on them. In this case, it would be really good if there was a mechanism or institution where the victim could report the scam and once verified it would gather information from Google, Dropbox sign, the bank receiving the funds, and other tools scammers use to build a case against the scammer in the relevant jurisdiction, and avoid them using the same tools for further scams.
My strategy to repel scams is to stay humble. Mo matter how much I think I'm prepared to identify scams, I am still vulnerable and I will continue to be vulnerable. Arrogance is your worst friend if your objective is to stay safe. No matter how many ceremonies you do when you're 16, in the right context and with the right words, you will still fall for a talented social engineer.
I’ve worked many years in fields adjacent to scams and fraud. I’ve seen many different kinds, especially romance and financial scams. This knowledge doesn’t make me more confident about avoiding scams, it’s made me realise that anyone can be scammed regardless of knowledge or intelligence.
Scams are about identifying what the victim really, really wants and offering it to them with some constraint. Some people are desperate for a job, for money to make ends meet. That desperation short circuits their common sense. I’ve seen successful romance scams that were so obviously scams. Even if you were in love, why didn’t you think twice about sending $10k the second time?? Neither of these would have worked on me because I’ve never been desperate for either of them.
That doesn’t mean I would dismissively talk like you did, saying no one should fall for them. I can be scammed, it’s just a question of finding what I’m desperate for and offering that to me, maybe with time pressure. In that situation I would ignore obvious red flags like a business asking for gift cards.
I need to be successful every time, the scammers need to be successful only once.
Victims of the gift card scam don't really think that the government wants you to pay your fines/taxes in Google Play money. The implication is that a government employee will make the problem go away if you pay them under the table. The victim is being made to feel that they're a participant in the scam, which makes them less likely to report it once they figure out they're getting cheated.
That people buy gift cards at all boggles my mind. You're buying a currency with less versatility (and hence value) for 1:1. Where I live, we have perfectly fine government-issued bills to gift if that's your thing. Somehow, that's considered a bad present? Because it's lazy? Because it doesn't show your opinion on clothes brands? I don't get it, from the consumer's perspective. To the shop/mall it's a clear winner, since you know some receivers won't use their cards. It's a proper arbitrage to them.
Yeah OK but then there are 100s of other general principles you need to know in life. Calling someone stupid every time someone doesn't follow one of the things that's obvious to you is not constructive. We need things like this to go public to avoid them from happening, and shaming victims doesn't help here. The author is already extremely apologetic in this post, and still there are people saying he's stupid for almost falling for it. I am usually quite rational, but I've done some pretty stupid and embarassing things at times where I was not thinking everything through. I imagine most people have.
Imagine you go to vacation to Paris, take an evening walk and get mugged. Your attitude is like the local saying "what an idiot for walking around in that neighborhood at night".
I think the part that makes it more difficult to detect that this is a scam for someone that never encountered it is that it relies on the difference between real money in your account and "money" that can vanish at any point, you just don't know it. This is a case that most people don't encounter outside of this kind of scam. Another unintuitive part is that even if the rules of the bank say the money is yours, it actually isn't if it came from a third-party that was hacked/scammed/whatever.
The gift card thing is something that should trigger an alarm even if you never heard of it.
Every day somebody is born who hasn't heard one of these stories! And honestly one thing about life is that you generally are slowly building up trust with people, and then can be asked to do things that are totally legit all the time.
Of course skepticism is required, but I know a lot of people who got dealt a lot of shit by their (real) employers simply by not understanding what is normal or not, as it was their first job.
This is slightly different to most. Would it have got this far it is was a cold contact? Probably not.
What this group did was lure someone into thinking they're part of a company as you're more likely to do what your employer tells you and you're far more likely to trust your employer too.
It probably pays off for the scammers to spend time this way as they probably get a much better conversion ratio.
I suspect that given enough effort and the right circumstances you too could be scammed. And that's pretty much the problem: scammers have near infinite time to set you up, it's their day job after all and you have a limited time to verify their bona fides.
Delta airlines gives gift cards as payment for volunteering on oversold flights. Really doesn’t help dissuade people from “$50 Panera Bread” gift cards from being involved in transactions not involving Panera Bread.
In general, a commercial entity will rarely use a free email service like Google mail. And the ones that do, are too small to keep you employed very long.
And yes, these scams show up anywhere there is no traceable financial history to the advertiser. Also, did you know using a staffing agent is pretty much a guaranteed %15 to %30 pay cut from if you applied directly to a company hr contact. Note too, that once you use a staffing agent, that often your CV can no longer be considered when directly submitted to a firm that also recently posted on the agents service.
Asking employees for money sounds like a ridiculous premise, and rather cheeky if it is normal in your area.
Not losing anything but coming this close to getting scammed can feel very embarrassing. Thank you for putting this up to warn others. I can tell from the intro that you still feel duped. Yeah, it seems obvious in retrospect, but it really is very understandable. We want to believe it’s true so badly that we’re willing to look past all the red flags.
I haven't gone through all the comments, but am I the only one in here who doesn't want to read past 2nd email? If someone sent me some shady email address, then that shady email address sent me a message saying, "Hey it's me that shady email address owner, but I can't get to it, so I am using ANOTHER shady address."
Someone convince me this post of his is not a waste of time.
For everyone who is commenting on the grammar/spelling mistakes, this is on-purpose. It dramatically increases the positive predictive value of their scam (i.e. the probability that the victim they have messaged on day 1 will go through with the wire transfer on day 5). It does this by pre-filtering the general population for gullible individuals.
There's this magician called Jamy Ian swiss that I often watched. He would do a card trick and fool you. Then he tells you how he does the trick, and still fools you. It doesn't matter how much he tells you, you'll still get fooled because "Nobody thinks that magicians will work this hard to fool you."
These scam tricks still work in 2022 because we think scammers are always on the nose. We never think how hard they will work just to fool us.
Yeah I've encountered at least a couple of recruiter companies who were really weird and gave me bad vibes and decided not to continue with them, trust your gut, what made me think twice about these recruiters:
1- Unusually bad English (Not talking about normal immigrant English like mine, but like really bad, no way someone hired this person to recruit for these kind of positions).
2- These `recruiters` talk in very low volume, I had to tell them to speak louder, my guess is that they are in an office with a lot of people doing the same.
3- They ask you about weird stuff in their e-mail communication, like sign something in early phases of interviewing.
4- When tell you when they will call you and the number is flagged as 'SCAM LIKELY' then they tell you to save the number, super red flag
After that I googled the companies / job postings and were super generic with bad reviews in glassdoor.
Do you trust any work related email sent to you using a gmail account? Cause I absolutely don't. I work in a very very tiny startup and even this guy sent me the acceptance mail through his company site.
Nobody in any kind of business uses @gmail.com. Maybe some Etsy person selling out of their extra bedroom, but that's it.
Domain names and email hosting is too cheap to use gmail for business. Even if it was a legit business, I'd stay away if they couldn't be bothered to do that minimum.
In my life as a contractor, I've only seen one company exec use an icloud.com email account for work related communication. So, it's very unusual but at least I've seen one legit use case.
I think it's quite simple: If you are starting a job, the company pays you. Never ever should you spend a significant amount of money before receiving the first pay check.
One thing what does not help is that legit companies and businesses act as scammers. I receive also a valid calls from companies and email which look 100% as scam.
Just recently I got call from hospital about upcoming my procedure (I did not answer — all unverified calls go to vmail) and when I called back the hospital and they had no clue.
But it was a valid call: they outsourced all these things to company x which outsourced that to company y. All they cared is that company which does this have HIPPA compliance - all other things (unverified phone numbers, central system, etc.) whatever.
Sorry, but Your case with hospital, is very similar to typical corporative chaos, when because of CAP theorem (corporations are distributed systems by definition), information delays unavoidable, and one department already know information, and others have no clue.
Pretty common scam, and one that I've run into multiple times, including at the very start of my freelance IT work right out of high school. In that case, a "business" wanted some computers fixed, but they needed to be released from some courier. The "business" stated they would send a check for me to deposit, and that I would then pay the courier on my end to release the hardware to be delivered for me to repair and send back. I hadn't seen this scam before, but I knew something was fishy; after all, if they're able to write me a check, why wouldn't they be able to pay this courier themselves? I stood my ground, insisting that delivering the hardware for repair was their responsibility, and theirs alone. The "business" sent the check anyway; I shredded it and ghosted them. I only learned later how common such check-bouncing scams indeed are, and how big of a bullet I had dodged.
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|3 years ago|reply
Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise.
She not only lost $3000 from the scam check, she also lost her old job, having given two weeks notice and didn't realize it was a scam until she was gone. The thing that pained her the most was the shame of having been scammed.
Although some red flags were there, her main blind spot was the disbelief that scammers would go to so much effort to (a) set up an entire website for the fake company, (b) were willing to spend hours in the fake interview, and (c) having her do two weeks of "training" courses while they waited for the laptop and other things she bought made it it cross country into their hands.
[+] [-] jacurtis|3 years ago|reply
The most shocking element of OP's story is that he never actually got interviewed by a real person. He filled out a questionaire, received no feedback from it other than "You're hired at 12.5% more than you're asking". This to me is the biggest red flag of all leading up to the actual "ask" to cash the check and send funds.
It seems odd to get a job for $90k /yr without ever meeting someone from the company. Even if that actually wasn't a scam, I would avoid taking a job for a company like that. How good are your co-workers going to be if they are just hired based on a text-based questionaire and a prayer?
[+] [-] silisili|3 years ago|reply
There's also some mental concept where people already got started or went so far, and subconsciously don't want to believe they've been had, so keep going. I'm sure there's a name for it, I can't be bothered to look up. It's why romance scams are so common, and also why that McDonald's manager undressed that employee, for example. Fascinating, but sad.
[+] [-] donkeydoug|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount74|3 years ago|reply
I've fallen victim to a scammer as well (paid rent to a "landlord" who it turns out didn't actually own the place). It sucks, but I don't think it's something to be ashamed of. Our society is built on trust, and some people exploit that.
[+] [-] wccrawford|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jestarray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spoonjim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesleyJohnson|3 years ago|reply
I'll spare the full back and forth, but the scam was somewhat similar in the setup. The send you a check, but instead of you wiring it back to them, you use the funds to purchase your remote equipment from THEIR online store. They have specific requirements on what kind of setup you need and claim it's easier for you to buy it from them in a bundle.
I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the correspondence between her and the "employer", but once she told me that I knew it wasn't legit. Why wouldn't they just send you equipment instead of check to buy it from them? We played along for a little bit longer, mostly because she wanted to believe it was legitimate and her pride was hurt. When they asked her to print a check from an email and then deposit that with her mobile app, she saw the writing on the wall.
She was very, very hurt and felt silly having to go back to friends and family and let them know she wasn't gainfully employed, after all. But thankfully we figured it out before we were out any money.
[+] [-] Forgeties79|3 years ago|reply
We are definitely being targeted unfortunately.
[+] [-] mdturnerphys|3 years ago|reply
Freeze your credit reports with all 3 credit reporting companies. Last year someone flew into Seattle from out of state with a driver license with their photo but my info, including an old driver license number. They got a bunch of cell phones and attempted to open a number of store credit cards with it. They bought a car with a fake of someone else's https://bellevuebeatblog.com/2021/04/28/64000-dodge-challeng...
[+] [-] cmckn|3 years ago|reply
Sorry you had to deal with that, sounds like a nightmare.
[+] [-] ipaddr|3 years ago|reply
If the offer hasn't been rescinded at least once it's probably a red flag as well.
[+] [-] ChoGGi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drummer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|3 years ago|reply
Scams don't work because scammers are smart; scams work because scammers exploit our motivations. Beware of charity scams this holiday season.
[+] [-] maccard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nigamanth|3 years ago|reply
"Do you have any other question ?" "Good morning how are you this morning." "I will send you later" "Good morning, How are you doing today ?" "This is very disrespectful and all director are to meet you for training on monday and you're 'suppose' to have all your materials before then"
It was practically a dead giveaway when the guy used "[email protected]", because the guy doesn't have access to the domain's email, he probably didn't even understand what you were saying.
[+] [-] ryandrake|3 years ago|reply
Same for the gift card scams. No legit business or government on earth in any industry asks for gift cards as payment! This is like an absolute ironclad fact of the universe. But so many people still fall for it!
[+] [-] zorrolovsky|3 years ago|reply
The problem is not victims, the problem is scammers. There should be better mechanisms to quickly clamp down on them. In this case, it would be really good if there was a mechanism or institution where the victim could report the scam and once verified it would gather information from Google, Dropbox sign, the bank receiving the funds, and other tools scammers use to build a case against the scammer in the relevant jurisdiction, and avoid them using the same tools for further scams.
My strategy to repel scams is to stay humble. Mo matter how much I think I'm prepared to identify scams, I am still vulnerable and I will continue to be vulnerable. Arrogance is your worst friend if your objective is to stay safe. No matter how many ceremonies you do when you're 16, in the right context and with the right words, you will still fall for a talented social engineer.
[+] [-] nindalf|3 years ago|reply
Scams are about identifying what the victim really, really wants and offering it to them with some constraint. Some people are desperate for a job, for money to make ends meet. That desperation short circuits their common sense. I’ve seen successful romance scams that were so obviously scams. Even if you were in love, why didn’t you think twice about sending $10k the second time?? Neither of these would have worked on me because I’ve never been desperate for either of them.
That doesn’t mean I would dismissively talk like you did, saying no one should fall for them. I can be scammed, it’s just a question of finding what I’m desperate for and offering that to me, maybe with time pressure. In that situation I would ignore obvious red flags like a business asking for gift cards.
I need to be successful every time, the scammers need to be successful only once.
[+] [-] kevin_p|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tommiegannert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustybolt|3 years ago|reply
Imagine you go to vacation to Paris, take an evening walk and get mugged. Your attitude is like the local saying "what an idiot for walking around in that neighborhood at night".
[+] [-] fabian2k|3 years ago|reply
The gift card thing is something that should trigger an alarm even if you never heard of it.
[+] [-] SanjayMehta|3 years ago|reply
Months of effort and multiple email domains created to push the scam.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq8m/india-nidhi-razdan-ph...
[+] [-] Delemono|3 years ago|reply
Every new human has to learn aaaaalll of this over again.
That's also why empires like the Roman was able to disappear.
Knowledge fades and we need actively teach over and over again.
More money to our education system!
And btw people still have no clue how computers work. This hasn't changed too much :(
[+] [-] the_gipsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|3 years ago|reply
Of course skepticism is required, but I know a lot of people who got dealt a lot of shit by their (real) employers simply by not understanding what is normal or not, as it was their first job.
[+] [-] 6c696e7578|3 years ago|reply
What this group did was lure someone into thinking they're part of a company as you're more likely to do what your employer tells you and you're far more likely to trust your employer too.
It probably pays off for the scammers to spend time this way as they probably get a much better conversion ratio.
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kortilla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|3 years ago|reply
And yes, these scams show up anywhere there is no traceable financial history to the advertiser. Also, did you know using a staffing agent is pretty much a guaranteed %15 to %30 pay cut from if you applied directly to a company hr contact. Note too, that once you use a staffing agent, that often your CV can no longer be considered when directly submitted to a firm that also recently posted on the agents service.
Asking employees for money sounds like a ridiculous premise, and rather cheeky if it is normal in your area.
[+] [-] baron816|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skilled|3 years ago|reply
Someone convince me this post of his is not a waste of time.
[+] [-] aabajian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxd|3 years ago|reply
These scam tricks still work in 2022 because we think scammers are always on the nose. We never think how hard they will work just to fool us.
[+] [-] rob-alarcon|3 years ago|reply
1- Unusually bad English (Not talking about normal immigrant English like mine, but like really bad, no way someone hired this person to recruit for these kind of positions). 2- These `recruiters` talk in very low volume, I had to tell them to speak louder, my guess is that they are in an office with a lot of people doing the same. 3- They ask you about weird stuff in their e-mail communication, like sign something in early phases of interviewing. 4- When tell you when they will call you and the number is flagged as 'SCAM LIKELY' then they tell you to save the number, super red flag
After that I googled the companies / job postings and were super generic with bad reviews in glassdoor.
[+] [-] shmde|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itgoon|3 years ago|reply
Nobody in any kind of business uses @gmail.com. Maybe some Etsy person selling out of their extra bedroom, but that's it.
Domain names and email hosting is too cheap to use gmail for business. Even if it was a legit business, I'd stay away if they couldn't be bothered to do that minimum.
[+] [-] nicolas_t|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharkjacobs|3 years ago|reply
Open call: Anyone out there paying or receiving payment with cheque in the last ten years?
[+] [-] andix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mint2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlogan|3 years ago|reply
Just recently I got call from hospital about upcoming my procedure (I did not answer — all unverified calls go to vmail) and when I called back the hospital and they had no clue. But it was a valid call: they outsourced all these things to company x which outsourced that to company y. All they cared is that company which does this have HIPPA compliance - all other things (unverified phone numbers, central system, etc.) whatever.
[+] [-] simne|3 years ago|reply
Sure, CAP theorem, is not reason to pardon chaos.
[+] [-] GistNoesis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwoutway|3 years ago|reply
I would submit this to law enforcement. Wire fraud is a crime that is often investigated, and the more examples of these scams they have the better.
[+] [-] yellowapple|3 years ago|reply