Got this job scam in my e-mail just a couple of minutes ago. I'll post the e-mail, then we'll discuss the scam warning signs.
From: "Pat Andrade" <tem.nancy@quil.fr>AGS Consult has an opening for a FINANCE MANAGER position.
We do our best to fit all our customers needs as soon as possible. Thats why all are staff is a professionally trained and can solve any problem that occurs on their way. We are not just a set of people, we are a family. We offer you, our potential colleague, to join us. See below, what we offer you.
General Requirements:
- Be at least 21 years old.
- Not special Qualifications Needed.
- Have a minimal experience and knowledge of basic bank operations.
- Ability to maintain confidentiality of all information.
- Willingness to work from home, take responsibility, set up and achieve goals.
- The Ability to create good administrative reporting.
- Honesty, responsibility and promptness in operations.
- The ability to operate with more than one task effectively, and have an adaptable, flexible, professional attitude.
- The ability of stable communication with our company and on-time and detailed reporting.
- Familiar to working online, Internet and e-mail skills.
What we offer:
- Generous salary (over 3,000.00 USD monthly).
- Social benefits and medical insurance.
- Free training and seminars.
- Paid Holidays plus 3 weeks of Paid Time Off (PTO).
This is easy job, but your help is very important for us and our clients. This job does not require any special education. You wouldn't have to pay us for taking you on our list. However we guarantee stable income.
If you wish to apply for a position with us, please visit on company site: http://agscons.com
The first red flag is that the from address has nothing to do with the company that's recruiting you. You're being recruited by agscons.com and the sender's address is at quils.fr. This isn't always a sure sign of a scam, but it should put you on your guard. Often, they'll pair it with a request to mail them back at a free mail service like Gmail or Hotmail and that's a double red flag.
In this case they send you to a web site. Don't be fooled by how professional it looks. You can get professional-looking flash-enhanced web site templates all over the place for a few bucks (or for free via peer-to-peer filesharing networks if you don't mind a little software piracy). Look instead at how old the site is. You can use the "whois" page over at Godaddy.com (or if you have a Mac, just open a terminal window and type "whois agscons.com" at the command prompt) and get the record for their domain. You'll see that their site's nameservers are at a .ru address, and the creation date for the domain is November 3rd, 2008. The fact they're in Russia and the domain's been in existence for all of five weeks is pretty much a guarantee you don't want to get involved.
And think about this... you need no special education, minimal skills, and they'll give you "over" $3,000 a month, medical benefits, and 3 weeks vacation plus holidays for an "easy job." As my father told me long ago: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is."
The fact that their domain name is agscons is probably a giveaway they didn't intend.
Normally, the keywords of "finance" and "bank" in these means it's a check cashing scam. Their "clients" send you checks for them. You're supposed to cash them at your bank then send the money via Western Union. If they were legit, they could get a real bank to handle this for them for a LOT less than they're offering you. Generally, the checks they send you are forged, but don't report as bogus until the clearinghouse bounces them or the owner of the account they were written against complains.
In the meantime, the bank has cashed it as a courtesy to you, and when it comes back bad, you're on the hook to pay back the money. Plus the cops may want to talk to you about passing bad checks, especially if you can't pay the bank back their money.
We all need some extra money right now. For many of us, just enough for rent, heat, and food would be a blessing. I know how tempting it is to want to believe these things might be for real. But they never are. Sorry.
Good luck to you all.
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Good clues in your post. What drew my attention was the second sentence, and it made me check the address (did not bother with whois or even go to their website). "Thats why all are staff is a professionally trained...." has two huge typos before "...professionally trained..." that would never see the light of day in a professional organization, whether US or anyplace else. There is no contraction "thats" it is always "that's" for "that is". Second, "...all are staff is..." sounds correct out loud, to an untrained ear, but "are" & "our" have no semblance of being interchangeable. Professional, indeed....
It never ceases to amaze me how much bad spelling and grammar there is in these emails. Unfortunately the type of person who thinks these emails are legitimate is probably the type of person who doesn't notice the mistakes, and doesn't put a mental red flag on them. Which unfortunately doesn't get us to doing a whois search or even knowing what that means.
By the way, my first clue is email not matching the sender name. "From: "Pat Andrade" " The email address from a legitimate source is usually a variation of the senders name (P.Andrade@quil.fr) or it's a generic company email (recruitment@quil.fr) never minding the already obvious email and company addresses not matching.