This one just slipped through my spam filters. I'll post the e-mail and then we'll look at the red flags.

From: Josefina Long <dingo2@esplanade.com>

Greetings,
You have received this message because you have published your resume at careerbuilder.com and you meet our criteria. And we offer position in our company.
Our company Morgan Trade Group was established in 1999, when an escalating market predetermined the urge of great number of companies-importers towards the complete control of their traffic. Thus, the growing tendency of upcoming companies and consumers to resort to services of particularized companies-forwarders created favorable conditions for the birth of Morgan Trade Group.

We provide the best working conditions for our employees:

Working with us you will get:

- fixed salary
- career growth
- qualified support of the skilled managers
- work in one of progressive team of the Europe
- challenging experience in the highly perspective field of business with great future career possibilities.

We provide an annual salary of $65,000/year. The salary is paid monthly or twise a month.
You will get flexible scheme of work and work in optimal time for you.

For additional information and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them via email derek.miller.mtg@gmail.com
It's not multi-level marketing, not sales position and absolutely free for start.

Please reply only to our e-mail: miller.derek.mtfg@gmail.com

We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards
Derek Miller

First, don't blame CareerBuilder. Every legitimate contact I've received through CareerBuilder was through CareerBuilder. Basically, in all those cases CB acted as a middleman and it wasn't until/unless I replied that there was direct contact between myself and the employer or recruiter. They didn't get your name or address from CareerBuilder. They've sent this to millions of people, but the people most likely to get fooled by their scam are people who are job hunting, and those people probably have a resume on CareerBuilder. They're just playing the odds by saying that's how they found you.

Second, this e-mail shows the oldest red flag in the book. The e-mail is from someone at esplanade dot com (which is a theater complex in Singapore), which has NOTHING to do with Morgan Trade Group. Then it tells me to reply to someone at a gmail address, which is Google's free e-mail service. Gmail is one of the more common ones the scammers use, but it could also be Hotmail, Live.com, or Yahoo too. The mail from an address totally unrelated to the business and a request to reply to an address at a free mail service is a dead giveaway every time. I have NEVER seen this happen when it wasn't a scam.

Now, furthermore, if you look at the underlying mail headers in the message source of the mail I received, you'll find Received: from [88.241.101.78] (helo=dsl88.241-25934.ttnet.net.tr). Now if they have an army of virus-infected zombies shooting these out, you may have received yours from anywhere. But we'll use mine for the purposes of example.

Even if this was somehow legit, the .tr top level domain is used for the country of Turkey. Why would someone claiming to be affiliated with a theater complex in Singapore be mailing me from a DSL line in Turkey?

Now, they don't tip their hand as to what the scam is, but it's pretty much going to be package forwarding or check cashing. These are the two that most often come up with the job offer scams. But with these huge, flashing warning signs, do you really need to know exactly how they're going to rip you off or use you as a shill to rip someone else off? Are you going to reply and get yourself on some criminal's radar just to satisfy your curiosity?

As my dad told me: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is." If someone sweeps in out of the blue and offers you a dream salary for a job they don't even define, you gotta figure that something's not right. That's probably why you googled these people and found my page.

I know it's tough. We're at 7.2% unemployment and rising in the U.S., and that doesn't even include the millions of people working part time who'd like to be working full time. I wish I could have told you this was on the level, but these folks are bad news. Don't reply to them.

Best of luck to you.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 1:53 am 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.