“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” This age-old advice about how to avoid a scam is probably common sense by now. But what may be less apparent is that it’s possible to get conned even while applying for jobs.
We’re all familiar with the cliche of the old friend from high school you haven’t heard from in years suddenly sliding into your DMs to try to lure you into a multi-level marketing scheme that doesn’t even make them a sustainable income. But some pyramid schemes, and other types of cons, come from less likely places. Below, I’m going to give you some tools to help you detect some of these on your own. (I placed a TL;DR section at the end in case you just want the list and prefer to skip over my full investigation.)
Weird Interviews
Years ago, I attended an interview in a building that looked un-lived-in. There was no art on the walls, no permanent-looking office space…just a meeting area with a whiteboard and a few folding chairs. That was weird, but at first I didn’t realize what it meant. Weirder still was that this interview turned out to be more like a training session, and that I was not the only applicant to be receiving said training. There were four or five other applicants in on my “interview”, too. The interviewer’s complete lack of interest in me or my background was alarming in itself, since I was supposed to be interviewing for a sales role and had no sales experience…and then he literally drew a pyramid on the board. Yes, just like that episode of The Office. I got up and walked out while he was preparing to hire all of us on the spot.
Legitimate jobs just don’t operate this way. That interviewer didn’t care what any of our qualifications were because they knew we wouldn’t be making any money via sales. These scams work by getting you to buy into something up front upon accepting the job–and that’s where they really make their money. That’s why they’re always hiring so many people so quickly.
The Investigation
Here’s one that I saw recently. A company that called itself a “consulting group” sent me an email to let me know they’d received my application and thought that “based on my background and skills” I could be a great fit for their position. This was a little suspicious given that: 1. I didn’t know what a consulting group was, and 2. I hadn’t sent them an application.
You read that right. I hadn’t even applied to this place that reached out to thank me for submitting my application. If you’re out of work and looking for a job, these con artists know you’re probably pretty desperate. They know you’re probably handing in resumes anywhere and everywhere you can and haven’t kept up with all the many applications you’ve filled out. But if you’re out of work because of the pandemic, or even if you’re just looking because your current job is exploiting your labor and not taking your health or safety seriously, then you know there aren’t a lot of jobs out there right now. You probably know exactly how many companies you’ve applied to and what their names are. Ironically, this puts you at a slight advantage over these scammers and their form emails. (A note on those later.)
Anyway, I like detective work. Especially when someone’s trying to screw me over. And I was curious who these people were. So I decided to do a little digging. It took a few tries to find their website. I ended up having to Google it alongside the name of my city, but eventually I got there. Their company was apparently named after a nearby geographical location. That made sense. But it was a little suspicious that the person who emailed me about my supposed application, claiming to be the CEO of the company, had a very similar name. (And that was weird in itself since those emails usually come from someone in HR, not the CEO him/herself.) So was the company named after the part of town, or the CEO? Or was it simply a made-up name designed to convince anyone not digging deeply enough?
Looking At Websites
I heard some useful advice not long ago regarding companies’ websites. If you go to their site and they have detailed descriptions about what they do, who their clients are, and how they help them, it’s probably legit. But if their site is all about who the company is, how much fun they have in the office, and generally how awesome they think they are without any proven results, run.
This company’s website was the latter. All of it was on a single page. The entire header was an ad calling themselves “premier”, with a tiny Contact button at the bottom. The body had a brief ‘About’ section with vague references to their “services and strategies”. Below that, another huge chunk of the site was devoted to how great the company was–“highly experienced”…”rapid results”…”cost effective”–again without any concrete information. Then there were three fake-sounding 5-star testimonials from individuals with no accreditation, two more buttons for sending them an email, and a map to their address. (And I noticed their name wasn’t even listed beside their little pin on the map, meaning they weren’t making use of a very basic marketing tool to drive business towards them.)
Using Whois
But I didn’t end my investigation there. After the two minutes required to look over their entire website, I still had no idea who these people even were. So I took my search to Whois. In case you didn’t know, you can enter any URL into Whois to try to find out who owns it. Any URL at all. For example, if you look up who owns Google.com, it tells you it’s owned by Google LLC in California. Yeah, that sounds about right. What about Facebook.com? They’re registered to the Domain Admin of Facebook, Inc. at Facebook headquarters.
You may come across an example where someone has security so you can’t see the registry details. That’s normal. What is not normal, though, is going to Whois and finding that a URL is owned by a completely different company than who they’re saying they are, with a different address. And that’s exactly what I found with this one.
That’s not to say that it can’t happen, of course. If the company you’re thinking of interviewing with is a subsidiary of another company, then it would all be on the up-and-up for that parent company to have registered the subsidiary’s website. However, when I then searched for that company, I couldn’t turn up a website at all. It was as though they didn’t exist–and interestingly enough, a search for both physical addresses (the one on the website and the one on Whois) turned up results for buildings that were listed for sale. Hmm.
Suspicious Emails
After all of this, I decided to reply to their email. I was almost positive by now that this was all one giant scam, but for giggles, I wanted to see what they’d say. Here’s their reply:
Hey Carrington, we would love to schedule a time to chat over the next few days. We do have a very tight schedule so just to be respectful of your time, would you have 15-20 minutes to check out our company overview before we pin down a specific interview date? If so, I can send you over that link to check out right away. After watching the overview I’m certain you’ll have a gut feeling whether we’re the right company for you and if it even makes sense to move forward with a one on one interview. For your convenience you can check it all out on your own time, and if it’s a fit, you’ll have a chance to come into the interview with a better understanding of the position as a whole and I imagine a lot of your questions will be answered as well. If you think you’ll have a few min to check it out I’ll send you the link. Just let me know.
I had a gut feeling, all right.
Remember earlier when I mentioned form emails? Sometimes these con artists don’t even try. Pay attention to the email address these messages come from. If everything past the @ looks like an actual website, then go to that website and check it out like I did above. But if the email is coming from something really generic looking, like hr@admin.net, or even a Gmail address because the company doesn’t even have its own email system set up, be wary.
Scoping Out Reviews
Anyway, the gut feeling I had earlier was exacerbated by what I saw next. The link they sent me had yet another company name in it! Not the one I had supposedly applied to, not the one that owned their website, but one that (when I Googled the name + the word scam) turned up the following results:
FRAUD SCAM LIES! You’re hired to make money for the higher-ups who are childhood buddies with [the CEO] so when you catch your manager using your agent number to write fake business to meet his quota, you’re shunned away because [the CEO] doesn’t care.
And this one:
[They] even try to go by different names to fool people into applying and then lie to them about the job aspects so you end up paying them money to apply. They make bank just off of you applying, so they don’t care if you stick around to make them more money or not. It’s basically a pyramid scheme.
In fact, there were countless results for this search. In the end I discovered it was a life insurance company operating under at least a fourth alias!
Check Social Media
I had another experience last week with a company that reached out to me, again telling me I’d given them an application. For what job, they didn’t say. It would have been nice since I had no idea who they were. (Another consulting firm.) Their website was still pretty generic and all focused on how unbelievably awesome they were, and their giant logo looked cheap and out of focus, but it was obvious they’d put a lot more thought into theirs. It had more than one page, and lots of photos of apparent employees having fun on the job. It also had links to their various social media accounts.
A few minutes on their Facebook and Instagram accounts showed me that their marketing person has been very active–but only as of the last six months. Before that, their accounts didn’t exist. That’s pretty weird for a company with tons of photos of the many events they’ve been to. Did this company not exist before January? Or did they just have zero online presence? That’s bizarre for this day and age. And I know they didn’t go to all those events between January and February of this year–and certainly not after! Could this be an intense rebranding campaign to get away from something like that other company with the four names?
Further searching revealed they had almost no followers on any of these accounts (it looked like someone had said, “Okay, everybody go follow the company Insta so it doesn’t look like no one likes us!”). Their LinkedIn account had one employee connected to it–one “LinkedIn Member” residing in London, UK. And no one, including Mr. Member, had reacted to a single one of their posts.
A Google search for reviews of the company showed seven five-star reviews from employees. Five of them were from three weeks ago (again, like someone had said, “Everybody go rate the company online!”), the oldest review from three months ago, and the newest from a week ago.
They’d done their due diligence, though. I couldn’t find any other information about who these people were–but I’d seen enough to know not to reply to their email. An email which went out of its way to assure me:
Just so you know, we DO NOT do anything door to door, business to business, or call center related. This is NOT one of those commission-only based positions either. We pay you hourly, you get your check weekly, and we offer bonuses on top of that, and of course, we offer paid training!
Uh-huh. Suuure.
Recruiters
Generally, in my opinion, it’s best to stay far away from these emails from recruiters. If the company is reputable, and the job legitimate, they don’t need to reach out to people with no relevant experience and beg them multiple times to come for interviews–especially not in this economy! I’ve turned off all the job alerts I originally opted into. After all, I’ve got several apps on my phone to do job searches on my own terms. I will say it’s disappointing that the vast majority of jobs I find on these apps these days are, in fact, scams. You’d think with their reputations, they’d do a better job of keeping all the fake jobs and scams out, but they don’t seem to be. It’s a shame.
TL;DR
Here’s the “too long; didn’t read” version for anyone who just wants a quick list or recap.
- Look at the email address. Does it look legit? Is it associated with a real website, or does it look like someone created an address on the spot just to send you an email?
- Plug the web address into Whois. If the name of the company doesn’t match up with the one that registered their website, something might be off.
- Look up their physical address(es). Do you immediately get search results telling you their building is for sale? That might be because they’ve rented space for a temporary office to hold “interviews”.
- Google the company name with the word “scam”. You can use Glassdoor for this, too. If you start seeing reviews calling this job a scam, run.
- Check out their social media accounts. How long have the accounts existed? How many followers do they have? Is it more than just a handful of employees and possibly their friends and family?
- Study their website. Remember: If it’s all about how awesome they think they are and how fun it is to work there instead of how exactly they help people, that might be a rat you’re smelling.
- Did you actually apply for the job they say you did? The con artists are banking on you forgetting and just taking them at their word that you sent them your resume. If their name doesn’t ring a bell, be on guard.
- Are they convinced you’re absolutely perfect for the job even though you have no experience? Be honest with yourself. It’s exciting to get called in to interview for that perfect-sounding job, and they know it. But if you have no idea why they’re calling you of all people when you have no relevant experience, it might be because they simply don’t care who they pull one over on.
- How weird is that interview? If you actually make it as far as the interview process, and you get there and discover that you’re already in a training session, that is bad news. If someone’s sitting in a corner waiting for you to give them some money for the privilege of accepting this job they begged you to take, and ready with the paperwork for you to sign your life away…well, you shouldn’t need me to tell you. Run, run, run!
Hopefully this has given you some things to think about. I’d love to hear about your similar experiences and any other tips you might have in the comments.
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