Scam or No Scam: How do we differentiate?

Today's Blog is about scams which people are going through, but most of the times it is difficult to recognise it at an early stage whether it is a scam or not. OKAY, so lets begin, people generally receive a mail like this:

Greetings.

Our company ALM is pleased to offer you a well-paid part-time vacancy for the position of administrative assistant/sales support.

You'll work at the convenience of your home, part-time.

ALM, a luxury goods company, presents the best off-season luxury finds from the most prestigious international designers and collectibles from the rarest collections at irresistible prices.

Candidates for the job should possess excellent organizational skills as well as the ability to efficiently multi-task. Ideal candidates have a strong focus on day-to-day operational excellence, and a personal style that builds trust, and inspires loyalty. The candidate should be motivated, proactive, be able to learn and adapt quickly.

Other duties of the Administrative Assistant/Sales Support include, but are not limited to:

. Incorporating effective priorities for the virtual office function

. Administer day-to-day financial responsibilities for clients

. Reporting online daily

. Preparing brief summary reports, and weekly financial reports

Salary part-time: 1,800GBP/month, plus commission.

Location: United Kingdom

If you are interested, please reply to : Leta@uk-groups.net with your short resume.

Best regards,

ALM.

So what would you do when you receive such emails. Ideally people search for:

1. The email address:

Now, if you search the email address, you might get a legitimate company or many links referring to that email address.

2. The names of the sender:

The names of the sender ideally are not helpful as they might be the actual names of good people who have no connection with this scam.

3. The name of the company:

Ok, you might go for the name of the company. Well, you could Google the name of the company, but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Technique:

So how do we resolve this in just a few seconds, the idea is simple, just copy the entire text from email. For example, Copy the line to Google search engine "Our company ALM is pleased to offer you a well-paid part-time vacancy for the position of administrative assistant/sales support. You'll work at the convenience of your home, part-time." and the results would be definitely on your screen, showing you that it is a scam or fraudulent email.

The scammers often use different email addresses, some email addresses are real, but some are fake. Often they use the name of a well-known Doctors, Lawyers, Government Officials, etc. so when you search them, you will find it that it is a good person and the company are genuine. The important thing that the readers can do is to know the source and whether they have actually applied for any such vacancy.

You can read in detail about the above scam on this forum: http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&p=36862

Another Scam:

There is another scam which I would like to point out, which happened to one of my friends. These people had advertised in Metro newspaper for Trainee Brokers as well as some well-known sites like efinancialcareers.com. My friend spoke to them in person and he was called for an interview. Having reached there for the interview in a nice location, where the entire building has over 400 traders, who trade day and night in different markets around the world, it looked quite genuine.

Visiting an Interview Call

Now here is the interesting part, which he explains. Instead of having an interview, it was more like a group discussion, whereby candidates could raise questions and queries which they have and on how it works. After the question hour session, the main co-ordinator started reading the contract and people were asked to sign the contract. Some signed and some didn't. Now my friend, who was struggling with cash, went ahead and signed the contract. Nothing happened for the initial three months, as he mentioned and the training was supposed to be conducted in January 2010, as mentioned in his contract.

Signing of Contract

In very fine line the contract was demanding the person to pay a sum of £3000 before the start of the training in full or partial payment. Now this was not understood by our friend. And the way it was written using legal terms made it very difficult to understand by a lay man. When a legal notice was received by him, he was completely shocked and surprised and his head stopped working.

Getting Out of Scam

Now the question was how did he got out from such scam. To his advantage he had already mentioned about his cash situation to the person in charge and had asked her how to cancel in the event he did not wish to go forward. At that moment he was told to send a letter by post to the mentioned registered address. So he had written a letter within 4 days and sent it by post and kept a scanned copy of the letter. Now this scanned copy saved his day, because when he received the legal notice, this scanned copy was emailed to both the parties, who later on withdrew the case and he was not harassed later on.

Recommendations

In both the above cases, I would recommend people to search first in Google using the above technique. The second thing is not to sign on anything suspicious. And thirdly, keep a scanned copy of all the transactions. I would recommend people to have a printer-scanner-photocopier along with them, as it is very handy tool to have as a student.

Hope this information helps you in your near future.

Cheers!!!

Rohan