Have you recently received any lucrative job offer from overseas, which sounds too good to be true? This is not meant to undermine your job qualifications, but there is more than a chance that it is fake. Nowadays, Internet scams have made their foothold in almost every country. Among numerous reported internet scams, one of the most common scam is the ‘Job Offer Scam’.
How does the Job Offer Scam Work?
In this particular scam, users are sent good, lucrative, but fake job offers. Generally, the users are asked to accept cash or cheque payments into their bank accounts. Then they redirect the amount to the account of the person running the scam. The user is instructed to keep certain percent of the amount transferred, as payment.
Most of these scams, employ similar techniques to entrap young job seekers in their web. They claim that they are facing some technical problems, like slow processing and currency conversion issues, which are preventing them from getting payments from abroad, in their country. Therefore, they need you as their overseas agent to bail them out of this issue. You will be asked to accept the payments on their behalf and transfer it to their account in an unconventional way, like wire transfer. However, their actual intention is to escape from the eyes of the legal authorities.
Unfortunately, there are lots of young job aspirants, who are innocent enough to believe these fake job offers to be true.
What preventive measures should be taken?
The best way to save yourself from these scams is to have a proactive mind. These are some of the preventive measures which you may follow –
i) Do not accept those job offers which ask you to accept payments on their behalf. Genuine companies never transfer payments from employees’ account.
ii) Generally, genuine companies do not hire through unsolicited emails.
iii) Genuine companies pay salaries to employees, not commissions.
Be safe while surfing over the internet! Don’t be a victim to these malicious Scams!
