This slipped through my spam filters this morning. Although it claimed to be via CareerBuilder and had CareerBuilder graphics, I'll show you how to tell it wasn't through CareerBuilder. First, the e-mail:

From: Genus PLC <candidateemail@site.careerbuilder.com>
Dear Candidate,

After viewing your resume on Careerbuilder.com, we have decided to contact you with a high paying job offer. We are looking for a Legal Representative in US.

The Legal Representative will work with the Application Development team to define and manage requirements, and serve as the key conduit to business users for those requirements.

You will perform impact fund receiving on incoming payment and support from the company's client, assist with good communication skills and Good booking keeping knowledge and receive for high level technical design specifications.

• Duties will include light bookkeeping, invoicing, filing, data entry
  and document control.
• Will be in charge of receiving payments via Bank Checks, processing these transactions and keep recordings as well as make necessary money transfers.
• Able to work from home

Requirement

• Basic to Intermediate skills in MS Word
• Basic experience preparing invoices
• Prior administrative or office clerk experience
• Attention to detail and organized, with good verbal and written communication skills
• US citizen or permanent residence/green card holder
• You will need to have an existing US bank account for processing the payments
• Clean criminal record

Benefits
Salary and commissions

• Salary: GUARANTEED commission up to $5,500.00 every month + $1,000.00 basis monthly salary.
• Commission: 10% from every fund received on incoming payment and support from the company's client (cashing checks).

If you would like to work for us, reply to this email with the subject “I am interested”

First off, there are no legitimate jobs from foreign companies cashing checks. Let's get this out of the way right now. A legitimate company can easily get a dollar-denominated account with any of a number of U.S. banks where client checks can be cashed. Paying a 10% commission plus Western Union fees (which are way more than a bank-to-bank wire transfer) is WAY more expensive than what it would cost them to handle this via a legitimate bank.

The checks are forged, but in many cases they'll pass first inspection. You cash them at your bank, send off the money by Western Union, keep the commission, and a week later your bank is telling you the check bounced and they're deducting the check's amount from your account. If you don't have enough to cover it, then you're on the hook for paying it back. This is a well-known scam.

Now, how do you tell the mail is forged? Look at the headers. There are different methods for this depending on your mail program. In Thunderbird, I use the "view message source" option. That shows me the "under the hood" routing information for the e-mail. If it was legitimately from CareerBuilder, you could trace the routing back to their servers, because they act as a proxy when they send you e-mail from an employer. This routes back to an Earthlink mail server which apparently received it from someone on an AOL account, probably someone who opened an e-mail attachment, got a virus, and has their computer sending out spam for criminals without even knowing it.

Last but not least, they're using a gmail address. A domain costs $7.69 a year at GoDaddy and you can use Google Apps for free to let Google run mail for that domain. For $7.69 a year and 10 minutes of set-up, you can have all the fun of gmail but use your own domain name. Any company offering you a $60k+ a year job should be able to handle at least thart much.

I know how hard it is. I'm unemployed too. I wish this was real as much as you do. But it's not. It's a rip-off, trying to take what little money you have left when you're already down. Aren't these criminals wonderful?

Best of luck to you all. God Bless. And if you have a moment, please check out the adventure novel I'm publishing here on my main blog or my new diet blog. They're a couple of the ways I'm trying to be productive while unemployed. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 1:50 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.