Just caught this job scam slipping through my spam filters. I'll post the e-mail, then I'll point out the signs that it's a scam.

From: Ferdinand Jamison <hburrows@reaching4solutions.com>

Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for paying attention to this letter. We would like to inform you that our company staff management had a chance to get acquainted with your resume at one of the job seeking websites and found it rather impressive and persuasive, so this is the reason why you have received this letter. Your candidacy would be perfectly suitable for the position of the financial department employee in our company.

Here is a quick review of our company. Our sphere of business activity includes working with different types of precious metals purchases or investments. We work with Gold, Silver, Platinum, Palladium and many other types of today's popular precious metals on the world market. PMI incorporated was set up as a local enterprise in Poland. Since 2004 we provide our services to our customers worldwide. The company clients(physical persons and organizations) come from more than 20 countries all over the world including the USA, Australia and many countries from eastern and western Europe. PMI Inc is an ISO-certified precious metals dealer. We have been in this business for almost five years, have reached serious success and recently expanded to work on United States market. This is the main reason for recruiting many new US employees. We are looking forward to work with intelligent, energetic and responsible people. PMI incorporated can be already considered as a very successful organization, but we have a lot of room to move further, using the basis that we have built and adding the future perspectives.
We do believe that almost half of any organization's profits strictly depend on the working staff, employees and managers, people who handle the business, help and support it. And that's why our strategy includes providing maximum we can for the employee of our enterprise. These are the privileges you get by entering our collective:
-Fixed basic salary with many comfortable ways of payment
-The opportunity of working on the remote basis
-Flexible schedules, gliding hours of work
-Working with a personal manager providing you with all the working instructions timely and clearly
-Worthy bonuses strictly depending on the profit we make together
-We provide the most modern communication devices to all our employees (Apple iPhone 3G/Blackberry devices, Macbook PRO/Sony VAIO laptops) after the first and second trial month of work correspondingly.
-2 weeks paid vacation twice a year
-Company covers all taxes; employee receives an invoice declaring his/her income

As we have already chosen you for this position the only requirements you need to satisfy at this point are:
-To be legally trouble free and have a clean record
-To have a personal and answering cell phone
-To have an internet access during the normal daily working hours
-To be disciplined, attentive and responsible

So please, make your choice and we thank you a lot for reading our letter independently of what decision you made or will make. Please remember that you don't have to make any investments or put any money anywhere to start working for our company, PMI inc does not run business with suspicious individuals or companies, we do not operate checks or money orders, we have a strong security system that helps to protect our customers and employees, helps to reveal any type of bogus. You have a chance to enter the successful, perspective and hard-working team, and we will try to provide maximum for you to not be disappointed and reach a remarkable career growth. We would really love to start our working co-operation with you. So if you have got interested, feel free to write us an email back at prmet.support@gmail.com for the further details

For further details, e-mail us at: pr.met.invest@gmail.com

Best Regards,
Timothy Stasevich,
PMI inc

So the number 1 sign, and most common sign of these job scams is found from looking at the "From" address and the address they want you to reply to. First, the name part of the "From" address (before the @ symbol) is usually a set of random letters and numbers. They're getting smarter and this time it's actually making some sense ("hburrows"), but it bears no mental connection to the sender's name, Ferdinand Jamison. Why would F. Jamison have HBurrows as an e-mail address? Additionally, why would someone at an American healthcare consulting company be sending you a job offer from a Polish precious metals trading company?

The letter isn't signed by Ferdinand Jamison either. It's signed by Timothy Stasevich. So the guy who sent the mail doesn't appear to have any actual relationship to the company and isn't even the guy who signed the letter.

Then, when you get through all those mental disconnects, they want you to reply to addresses at gmail.com, which is Google's free mail service. Sure I use gmail and I'm legitimate, but I'm a blogger, not a corporation. And if I wanted you to reply to me at my gmail.com address, I'd mail you from it, not from a domain totally unrelated to my blog or Google.

The "from" address at a domain totally unrelated to their business, a name totally unrelated to the name signed on the letter, and a request you reply to an address at a free mail service is something I find on almost every single scam that comes through my mail box.

Second big sign is that "we have already chosen you for this position" but they address you as "Dear Sir/Madam". They've picked you for this job out of thousands of potential applicants. They're going to give you money, a computer, and a Blackberry. But they have yet to prove they know your name. They even sent a contract attached in rich text format (RTF), but my name wasn't filled in there either.

Third sign is in the contract.

4.1. The Employee agrees to:

a) perform all business operations timely and within periods discussed with the Coordinator in advance;
b)receive payments from customers ,transfer payments to Enterprise under qualified instructions.

B is your dead giveaway. Most of these scams are ones where they need a representative in your country to cash checks and then wire them the money.

First of all, they could find a U.S.-based financial services company to handle this for them at a much cheaper price than what they'd pay you (plus the Western Union Fees). Usually what they're doing is sending you forged checks to cash.

Most banks will cash checks immediately for their customers if the checks are under a certain amount and/or the customer has enough money in the bank to cover the check. So you cash the check, run over to Western Union and wire off the money, and a week later the bank is calling you to tell you that the check turned out to be forged and they want their money back. You cashed the check so you're on the hook, and your new "employer" suddenly stops answering your e-mails.

Fourth sign is that you're reading this blog post. How many employees do they need? You and I make a minimum of two. But if you can find another person who's been offered this job as easily as you found me, you know you and I aren't the only ones. That means they're offering the job to everyone. And if they're sending a "Dear Sir/Madam" letter to everyone, offering them the job (not asking them to apply, but telling them they got the job), how legitimate can this job be?

Last, but not least, there's the lesson most of us learned from our parents. "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is."

Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but if you reply to this and take this job, you'll likely be a few thousand poorer in a matter of weeks. It completely sucks that these people are going to steal from you when you're probably hurting and really need a job, and are at a time in your life when you can least afford to lose that kind of money. But that's why they call them "criminal scumbags." They'd steal your grandma's dialysis money to pay for their champagne and hookers.

And because they're over in Eastern Europe, good luck getting any justice. The only thing you can really do is be aware of the signs of these scams and not get caught in them in the first place.

Best of luck to you all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Job Hunting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.