Job Scam: Professional Escrow Company
Apr 21st, 2008 by Greg Bulmash
I got the following e-mail with the subject: "Your Opportunity"
From: Cassandra Hayden <ssb@bluemedium.com>
Subject: Your opportunityMy name is Tim Kay. I am manager of Professional Escrow Company,
http://www.professionalescrow.orgResponsible employees are seeked for a part-time position. No experience is required. Our company will sign an agreement with you and you will be trained by us for free. You will be supposed to have a stable profit ($30000 - $40000 per year). Your profit will increase every year. I have looked through your resume and made up my mind that is a job for you.
If you are interested in that position please let me know and use my only personal e-mail address: escrow_services@juno.com
You will get all the neccessary information within 24 hours.
Yours sisncerely
Mr. Tim Kay
Manager
First red flag, if they represent professionalescrow.org, why are they mailing from bluemedium.com and asking you to reply to a juno.com address? Why aren't you getting mail from and replying to an address at professionalescrow.org?
Because if you did, they'd say they never heard of this guy and that his offer is bogus... Or would they?
Now, normally, if the scammers refer you to a web site, it's a bogus web site, set up 3 days ago to support their scam, and it looks bogus too. When I checked out their site, it looked very legit, much better than the normal scam sites. It even had a copyright notice of 2006 at the bottom. And they had a job contact information e-mail address listed for enoble@professionalescrow.org. So if you thought it looked bogus, you could write to enoble and they'd say Tim was legit.
Then I pulled up their registration data and found that the professionalescrow.org domain name, as per the usual, was registered 11 days ago on April 10th, 2008 and has a proxied registration to hide the real name of the domain owner. But the biggest red flag of all, the nameservers for the domain are in Russia.
I'm not sure what their angle is. It's likely identity theft, check fraud, money laundering, or some combination of the three. I don't reply to these folks and try to find out. I don't want to get any more slimy e-mail from them.
But even if they're not tipping their hand on what the scam is right away, it's got all the hallmarks and red flags of a scam. Don't reply to them and don't get fooled by them.
Good luck to you all.
Thank you for posting this Greg. It did look too good to be true, but what made me go hmm, was the wording. I know, everyone makes mistakes in their grammer now and then, but usually raises the red flags for me.
I do have a few questions, how did you pull up all of that info on them? I'm not all that computer savvy. If you could give me some tips on how where they are emailing from etc.
Thank you very much.
@Erika,
Looking at the mail headers (from, reply-to, and more detailed information) is different depending on the mail client you use. As for discovering when a domain was created, you can go to GoDaddy.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the "WhoIs" link.
Enter the domain on the WhoIs lookup page and it will show you the domain registration information. The primary bit you're looking for would be the "Created On" date, which shows when the domain registration record was created (i.e. when the domain was registered). If it's a week or two old, but the site is saying "we've been around for years, doing blah blah," then that should raise a large red flag. For example, if you look up professionalescrow.org, their "created on" date is April 10, 2008. If you look up Yahoo.com, their "created on" date is January 18, 1995.
Yes this is a scam! I contacted the true Professional Escrow Company in Seattle and they do not have any part time jobs available! Their web site has been hijacked and are looking into it. SO DO NOT REPLY TO THE WEB SITE LISTED IN THE E-MAIL IT IS BOGUS!!!