Got the following scam e-mail slipping through my spam filters this morning. It was made up to look like it came from CareerBuilder. We'll discuss why it's a scam and where it really came from after the text of the mail:

From: carrerpprocessor@gmail.com

Dear Professional,

After viewing your resume on Careerbuilder.com, I am impressed with your
qualifications and how they meet the criteria required.

We are a company based in United Kingdom and have found one job available
for you with GUARANTEED $5,500 every month INCOME.

First, you have to understand what our company is looking for and if you
think that this kind of job is made for you to ask for our Hiring Contract
to be signed. If you have one free hour daily (not including weekends) you
are welcome to join today. Our job is a flextime, flex-place opportunity
designed to fit around your family's income and time needs. You can earn up
to $200,000 a year (depends on our sales) and more after one year working
with us. We receive orders from US and we need a representative to process
the payments due to the delays in clearing checks here.

- Flexible program

- Checking e-mail and going to the bank

- Commission: 10% of every check, instantly cash in hand.

We have stocks of medical products for US customers and we need US
representative to intermediate the payments between our company and the end
buyers.

What we ask:

- One free hour daily not including weekends

- US citizen or permanent residence/green card

- You may have an existing bank account in US

- Internet access for sending and receiving e-mails

- Means for you to cash checks at your bank using your existing bank
account.

- Nobody will ask for your personal bank information

If you are interested working with our company reply today.

You can start within 2-3 days if you agree with our contract. Please contact
us by replying at this e-mail address and ask for:

Hiring Contract and detailed information about this opportunity.

First, no legitimate UK business needs to hire people in the U.S. to cash checks for them. I worked for a UK based business and they had a U.S. bank account where checks from U.S. clients were deposited. Legitimate foreign businesses have no problem getting banks in the United States to help them manage their cash flow from U.S-based customers and at MUCH lower costs than 10% commission, plus Western Union fees.

Most banks will cash a check for less than a few thousand for an existing customer without any holds being placed on the funds. So you get the money immediately. These crooks play on that, sending you forged checks that pass initial inspection, but fail to clear later in the process. By then, you've already taken the money, sent it to them by Western Union, and kept the 10% "commission". But when the check fails to clear, you owe the bank the entire amount because you cashed it. And when you go looking to get the money back from your "employer"... Good luck.

Second, look at the e-mail address it's from: carrerpprocessor@gmail.com Missing E, extra P. What legitimate business would have such a misspelled e-mail address?

Furthermore, what legitimate business would offer to hire you, but not tell you their name or address you by yours? This e-mail ticked me off, because usually they use a fake business name and/or have a fake web site so you can try to look them up on Google and find pages like this one.

As for it coming from CareerBuilder... nope, if you look at the detailed mail headers (on Thunderbird, select "Message Source" from the "View" menu) it came through Earthlink (elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net), probably sent by a Earthlink customer's computer that was infected with a virus and became a spam zombie.

In those initial contacts that have the CareerBuilder logo on them, CareerBuilder actually does act as an intermediary, sending you the e-mail so the potential employer doesn't get your e-mail address unless you reply (and thus can't easily compile a big list of job seekers' e-mail addresses). When you look at the detailed mail headers on a legitimate CareerBuilder e-mail, you'll see it came through CareerBuilder mail servers with a DomainKeys signature for authentication.

I know that in these economic times, this seems like a dream job. But it's just foreign crooks looking to make your pain even worse by stealing a couple of thousand dollars from you when you can least afford to lose it.

Best of luck to you. And if you're unemployed like me with some time to spare, check out one of the ways I'm trying to be productive with my down time and put positive creative energy into the universe: my online novel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 11:36 am 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.