The current global financial crisis has meant many individuals have been forced to look for alternative sources of income online, to start a business or to supplement their current income.
Many visit online recruitment sites to find part time jobs they can easily do from the comfort of home. Unfortunately many of these sites accept any employer placing a job advertisement without scrutiny. It has opened the way for scammers to target desperate individuals looking for extra income, by advertising non-existent jobs and services.
One such non-existent job that has been doing the rounds lately is sometimes advertised as a data entry clerk, or something along that vein. It usually advertises a shipping and distribution company, possibly involving the use of textiles with subsidiary companies located internationally (to avert any suspicion as to why any later address might not be in the country the job ad was advertised in), they may even go so far as to place a genuine company (which they randomly obtained from the net), but as usual no contact details are displayed.
The fraudster typically requests the name, address and contact details of their potential victim, and also asks for a CV with the excuse that they need to verify the competency of their potential victim in terms of data entry, but in reality regardless of what is written in the CV, no candidate is turned down.
The fraudster then tries to legitimize the scam by claiming that their international subsidiaries have several cheques from the located country and it would cost them as a company a large bill to cash these cheques themselves, and it would be cheaper to use the bank accounts of local individuals in the various countries their firm operates in.
It all sounds plausible except for the request to always send "the remittance" or "bank draft" to the fraudster after subtracting their commission. The cheque is usually an overpayment, and since the fraudster has already mentioned that the company is international, it is hoped this will assuage their potential victim into not feeling suspicious.
The scam is a well known overpayment scam, where stolen cheques possibly obtained via identification fraud or possibly by sending emails pretending to be an official source, to get the potential victim to reveal their details; are made by the scammer and their various affiliations, and they need someone to deposit the cheques and send them the cash. As is usual with this type of scam, an untraceable money transfer system is always the choice, and once the scammer has collected the money, they are never heard from again, or their job. Unfortunately the only trace will go back to their hapless victim who now has to explain to the police why they were cashing stolen cheques.
Regardless of the inconsistencies many people still fall for this scam purely because of the greed factor, the thought of getting a large amount of money for virtually doing nothing, which the scammer is preying on. To any who may not be aware of such a scam and happens to see such a job vacancy, there are a couple of things that immediately stand out as warning bells, first of all the term "bank draft" is rarely used by individuals in colloquial speak, but amongst banks, and scammers. Secondly the scammer always has a free disposable email address for their victims to contact them by, any reputable company normally has their own email address, and certainly an international company with various subsidiaries should equally have their own email address.
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