Just caught this scam slipping through my spam filters. I'll post the e-mail, then debunk it below.

From: Gonzalo Atwood <ipp@pacific.net.sg>

COMPANY: Bogo International Company
JOB TITLE: Shipment Inspector
TYPE OF WORK: Tele-commute (availability of work from your residence)
EMPLOYEE TYPE: Full-Time/Part-Time
INDUSTRY: E-Commerce
JOB TYPE: Sales
EFFECTIVE DATE: ASAP
REQUIRED EDUCATION: Not specified
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE: At least 1 year
REQUIRED TRAVEL: Not specified
REQUIRED RELOCATION: Not specified
SALARY: Negotiable, depends of your personal skills (more detailed in further communication)
SCHEDULE: Flexible
TRAVEL: Unnecessary

CONTACT: Personnel manager Mileva
EMAIL: mileva@bogointernational.cn

We are a supplier to Sellers, meaning that we scour the internet for close-outs that can be bought low and sold high. Our contacts include manufacturers with close out items and distributor overstock. The Sellers purchase products using our service then sell them for a sizeable profit.

JOB DESCRIPTION

What we need are people to act as Shipment Inspectors. You would receive the merchandise, check for quality of packing and make sure the product is in good condition. Then you would reseal the package and send to the seller.

- No overheads
- No hidden fees, upfront payments or Investments
- Free start for employees

Qualifications/Education:
- High School diploma or equivalent
- Relative experience, Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (1 or more years)
- Basic Math, English language skills
- Geographical locations
- Additional languages may be preferred
- Basic computer skills

Ability to operate and maintain equipment including handhelds, computers. Develop, maintain and monitor relationships with store level accounts. Effective oral and written communications, problem-solving skills to reflect level of responsibilities. Able to maintain sensitive and confidential information. Past experience on E-Bay, drop-ship and resellers networks is a plus.

Requirements:
- Basic knowledge of computer and internet
- Sending and Receiving emails
- Fax machine or scanner and printer
- Contact phone (preferably Mobile)

Feel free to email back ONLY at: mileva@bogointernational.cn (manager Mileva) for further communication.

My first thought when reading this was that the Chinese are joining the Russians in the job scam business, but then I saw "manager Mileva" on the last line and wondered if it might just be Russians pretending to be Chinese.

TWO HUGE RED FLAGS: If you get one of these spam e-mails with an actual domain in it (like bogointernational.cn), do not go to the site. It could try to install a virus or other malware on your system. The first thing to do is a "whois" lookup. This can be done by visiting the "whois" page at GoDaddy or another registrar. Or if you're on a Mac or Linux system, just bring up a terminal window and type "whois bogointernational.cn".

The results will often be fun. For example, my suspicions were immediately confirmed when I saw that the nameservers for bogointernational.cn were at leaderhost.ru (".ru" means Russia). Not only that, but you want to know how old bogointernational.cn is? Today it's a whopping 5 days old. Any business looking for employees via unsolicited e-mail, sporting a web site that's a few days to a few weeks old is very suspicious.

THERE ARE OTHER SIGNS TO WATCH FOR: After check cashing and payment processing, a huge fake work at home scam is package forwarding. Usually criminals buy stuff from auctions, businesses, etc. with forged checks, stolen credit cards, or compromised PayPal accounts, but the sellers are smart enough not to honor any transaction where they're asked to ship a package to Russia or some other sketchy location. So the crooks find a dupe in the U.S. to accept the packages and then re-mail them out of the country.

I've been contacted by these kinds of crooks via my clipart web site trying to buy some item my site turned up in a Google search for, usually because I had a clip art image of it on the site. Their latest thing is to pretend they're ministers trying to secure goods for an orphanage they're building in Africa. Lovely, ain't they?

CLASSIC RED FLAG - SENT BY ONE PERSON AT ONE SITE, REPLY TO ANOTHER PERSON AT ANOTHER SITE: On almost every one of these scam mails it's the same. The sender is a fake name or nonsense string at a web site that has nothing to do with the business, then you're asked to send your reply to a totally different address at a different domain. Here, the sender is a person at pacific.net.sg, a Singaporean webmail service, and the person you're supposed to reply to is at the company domain (bogointernational.cn).

Now, this is not always a sign of a scam. But it's something that occurs in them so often that it should always be enough to make you suspicious and set you to investigating further.

BIGGEST RED FLAG OF ALL: It's spam. You never heard of these people, they're not legitimately coming through any of the job sites you signed up with. They just popped into your mailbox out of the blue. You wouldn't buy from a spammer would you? Why would you take a job from one?

SUMMING IT ALL UP: This e-mail shows way too many warning signs of a criminal scam to ignore. I cannot say I investigated them by replying, taking the job, and ensuring beyond a reasonable doubt that this was a scam, but I can say that I've seen enough of these to know a scam when I see one.

If you're driving through a bad part of town and a strange woman with her ass hanging out of a mini-skirt, wearing 5-inch heels and too much makeup calls to you from the sidewalk and asks if you want to "have a good time," it's a pretty safe bet she's a hooker. If you get spam from a company with a 5-day old web site wanting you to forward packages for them, it's a pretty safe bet they're criminal scum.

I'm job hunting too and it's not easy in this economy. I'm sorry if you were hoping this was real. Good luck to you and God bless.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Job Hunting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.