It's been a while since a scam mail made it through the spam filters, but this one just got through moments ago and it displays all the red flags. I'll post the mail, then we can go through the flags.

From: Leila Witfield <aaiis@brandtart.com>

A deferential insurance broker, procures exclusive employment opportunity in the accounting field, to reveal your work
potential within the underlying industry. We're in seek of uprising professional accountants, who'd be interested in
participating in the extensive training course, oriented to provide necessary tools to best fit your learning patterns. Amidst
other benefits, prosperous career advancement opportunities, 30 000 USD annually and excellent reimbursement plan, will
justify your efforts to curb and propel the following responsibilities of the vacancy.

-- This is part time work at home position and can easily combine this vacancy with other work.
-- Your education and status don't matter.
-- You will receive payments (Direct Bank Deposits and wire transfers) from client within United States and send it by instant
payment sistem such as Western Union. You will receive 5% of processed amount.
-- To start work with us you must only have basic checking account at any bank. Your financial information will never be disclosed to third parties.
-- You can work 2-3 hours per day or fulltime.
-- This is not insurance sales position and you don't need to sell insurance, this is Money Transfer Assistant vacancy.
-- You do not spend your own money and there are no startup fees. All charges for withdrawal or transferring the money will be deducted from the payment.
-- We do not ask any personal information and we run business according to laws of the United States of America.
-- Your fixed salary is 2000 USD a month + 5% from each payment processed by you.
-- The main responsibilities will be to fill forms, receive and transfer money from our clients at the United States to our couriers.

If you want to apply please send all your questions and contact information at HRManagerPIC180@gmail.com .
We're looking forward to our further communication.

Phone: (520) 762-7351
Fax (520) 844-0888
Julie Mathews. HR department.

Now, this one is different from a few in that it provides a domestic U.S. telephone number (the 520 area code is in Arizona). I don't know if it actually works. I don't have caller ID blocking, so I'm not going to call them and put my phone number on their radar. But I don't need to call them to know it's a scam.

Red Flag #1: Reply To a Different Person - A hallmark of these spams is that 99% of the time, the "from" address is a meaningless string of gobbledygook at a site that has nothing to do with the indicated business. Brandtart.com is a parked domain with no site at it, registered to a business address in Bellevue, Washington. What it would have to do with a foreign insurance broker, I have no idea.

Then you're asked to reply to a totally different address at a free mail service; not at a different more legitimate domain, but at a free mail service like hotmail, gmail, live.com, or Yahoo. In this case, it's HRManagerPIC180@gmail.com.

This, by itself, isn't a 100% giveaway. But it's fishy enough to get you suspicious as it's an EXTREMELY common spammer tactic.

Red Flag #2: Accepting payments, then forwarding them by Western Union - This is the 100% giveaway. There is NO legitimate job that asks you to accept payments, take a commission for your trouble, then forward them out of the country by Western Union. Any legitimate foreign business can find a legitimate U.S. bank or business services company that would handle these matters at a fraction of the cost. The only ones that need to go recruiting via junk e-mail are the ones that are doing something naughty.

Usually, the payment you receive is somehow forged. When you cash the check or withdraw the transfer, you become liable for paying the money back when the fraud is discovered. But by then, you've wired the money out of the country. You're now on the hook for hundreds or thousands of dollars and your new "employer" is nowhere to be found.

Red Flag #3: What's their Name? - A lot of times they'll give you a fake company name, but that makes it easier to check them out with Google and find sites like mine. That may be why they didn't use one here.

Red Flag #4: No experience necessary - They're going to pay you $2,000 a month, plus 5% of the payments you process. To have that salary plus commission come out to 10% of the payments, you'd have to be processing $40,000 a month for a salary + commission of $4,000 a month. So they're going to pay you $48,000 a year for a job that doesn't even require a high-school diploma.

On top of this, they're saying it should take 2-3 hours a day. So if we go with the outside figure of 15 hours a week and the average of 4.3333 weeks per month, they're paying you $4,000 for 65 hours work, or $61.50 an hour... with no experience or education necessary. If no one told you "if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is," let me be the first.

Red Flag #5: Horrendous English - Now this isn't always a dead giveaway. Apparently the technical recruiting field has become as enamored with cheap Indian labor as other technical fields and I have been contacted by thick-accented recruiters who have literally said "When you were owner-operator at Distressed for Success, who was your manager there?" Ummm... I was. What part of "owner" is unclear?

But when the English is this bad throughout... "uprising" accountants... "curb and propel the following responsibilities of the vacancy"... wow.

In summary I just applied for my "emergency extension" of unemployment benefits. I have a new baby. I know how hard it is out there and how badly a person can want something like this to be true. But it has too many warning signs of a scam that's just going to use you, steal from you, and leave you hurting worse than before. I'm sorry if these foreign criminal jerkwads got your hopes up, and I'm sorry to dash them.

Good luck and God bless!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 12:42 pm 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.