Are you a reliable professional in the United States, interested in a potentially lucrative partnership with an international firm? If so, you could be targeted by scammers offering you up to $4,000 per month.
The Internet fraud tracking site Scamdex.com today reported a rapid increase in the incidence of a new employment scam.
The scammers target people who are in need of a job by appearing to be a lgitimate company that needs help to expand their business.
After making an almost exact copy of a legitimate company’s website, using their text, graphics, colours and layout, the scammers contact potential victims.
The scam involves you as the new employee agreeing to act as the company’s “financial representative”, and accept a ‘Certified Check’ which you deposit into your own account..
Your bank accepts the check and the account is immediately credited with the proceeds of the “test check”, often around $1500.00. Your own Bank Manager will confirm that the transaction is valid and that your account does contain the cash from the check.
Within 24 hours, the company requires you to deduct your commission, about 10%, and send the remainder of the money to your “employer”, using Western Union – this makes it untraceable and unrecoverable.
Several days later, after they have your money and you think you just made a good profit for doing almost nothing, your bank tells you the check was fake and you now owe the bank the money you paid to the scammers.
The scammers do not send the check to you. They deposit it directly into your bank account, in order to reduce the turn-around time.
According to Scamdex.com and other reports, one in 20 people on the internet fall for online scams.
The invitation to become an employee of these fake companies almost always comes to you through an unsolicited email message.
The scammer may harvest your name from a website or forum or after they use a dictionary program to generate names at common domains. In other cases, they may approach you in a forum or after they find your resume on a job site such as monster.com or careerbuilder.com
The number of scam sites involved is growing daily.
One known scam site is Avangar Technologies, using the sites avangar.com avangar.org, avangar.biz.
Avangar uses an almost exact copy of the real site Avnet.
Some other known scam sites are Barrett Market, German IT Corp, Microlabs and GermanSun.
The newest scam site, discovered today, is trustbizjob.com, which is linked to banksecureform.com
If you receive an employment offer from any company requiring you to accept and transfer money, Scamdex.com recommends you ignore it because legitimate companies do not offer such positions, especially by using unsolicited email.
If you are considering accepting, be sure to check with a reputable scam reporting site such as scamdex.com. Remember that you may become the victim of a scam or you may be guilty of laundering money.
While there are gullible people, scammers and spammers will continue their evil ways.
For more information visit Scamdex.com
