I got this particular e-mail twice in the last 24 hours at different addresses, so I thought an advisory was wise. Here's the mail. I'll debunk it afterward.
Hello.Agrautoparts ltd. is looking for people who will work in our team.
This is part-time job. You will work only couple hours a day.Necessary criteria to the employee: ability to work in the Internet, ability to work with payment systems.
Manager responsibilities: possess situation under orders, conduct statistics of sales, coordinate sellers, constantly be on communication.
If you are interested, please contact us by E-mail: career@agrautoparts.cn
Thank you.
Three major scam signs here:
1: It's spam. One of the addresses this arrived at has never been registered with any job board site.
2: The domain agrautoparts.cn is two months old. Even if it wasn't a scam, the business wouldn't have much of a track record. They've also been flogging this since their site was barely a few weeks old. A quick search of Google showed a more detailed ad (with more scam red flags) posted to the Acapulco edition of Craigslist on April 4th.
3: The phrase "ability to work with payment systems." There is NO legitimate work processing payments for foreign companies. These are always scams that either get you to give them access to your bank account (so they can clear you out) and/or cash forged checks and money orders for them and then send them the money by Western Union. You get robbed and/or become an accessory to check fraud.
It would be nice if some foreign company came out of the blue and offered you a lucrative part-time job that allowed you to work from home just a few hours a day. But it would also be nice if there was a fairy that gave you a dollar every time you sneezed. These foreign payment processing jobs are about as real as that fairy. Sorry.
Best of luck to all of you. If you're really hurting, read my recent post about counting your blessings. If you're unemployed and like to read, check out the supernatural fantasy novels I've been writing while slogging through the crapfest of being unemployed.
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Sigh... I got this too! Now while there are some companies where you can work from home with a good internet connection (Hilton reservations is one such job) I don't know of any employment where you have to have a bank account to process client payments.
(Unless you're self employed selling pottery or art or crafts or what have you to people. Or you have a stall in a flea market. But you get my drift, right?)
Which bummed me out when I got a reply back and saw this line...
"– Banking account (if possible) to receive funds from our clients ;"
Well crap... and here I thought it was like an internet order service job or some such.
Oh, as for the Hilton customer service, I've seen the advertisements for that. It sort of boast that you can work in your slippers. And there was a pair of fuzzy bedroom slippers on the ad. Very cute. Actually know one lady who does that.
I also did work as contract labor formatting Excel accounts for printing. I downloaded them from the company website and formatted them on my home computer and then uploaded the finished excel files. But I knew who I was working for and had met the company reps before.
And of course, they didn't need access to my personal bank account.
Anyway...
Sad thing is that this takes advantage of folks looking for work, who probably can't afford to be scammed. I have run into folks who don't have a high literacy level, and the darned reply e-mail had enough funky grammar that it might confuse someone who is under-educated.