A job that never was
Once I received an email from a source that claimed to be a globally operating airline company with a job offer for the post of an IT Manager. It was a nice warm personal message, containing details of the job they were offering, the nice fat salary, and a lot of extra perks like a company car and telephone.
I had in fact previously posted my resume on a popular job portal, and a few weeks earlier someone claiming to be from that same company had interviewed me over the phone. I thought I’d ‘cracked it’, and was delighted to receive a job offer in these difficult times.
The email seemed completely authentic, but doubts started to creep in when I spotted a spelling mistake in the company brand: a household name. I decided to check out the email in detail before conveying the ‘good news’ to friends and family.
Of course, on careful inspection I found that it was fake!
a) The email address was incorrect, and was sent from a domain name that looked almost identical to the actual airline company … but not quite.
b) The company postal address was incorrect.
c) What is more, they had asked me to pay 1500 pounds via wire transfer towards my Work Permit expenses, and also to post my passport to a local company they had nominated. They assured me I would be reimbursed, and that my passport returned within 2 weeks of signing up.
It was a scam! They had extracted information about me that was available on the Internet, and then sent me a fake job offer, with the intent of not only extracting money from me, but also stealing my passport.
All web users should be very wary of (often unsolicited) job offers that arrive unexpectedly over the web. Next time it could be you receiving the offer of ‘a job that never was’.
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