Credit Check Job Scam: Genco Advertising
Posted by Greg Bulmash in Techno Thoughts, tags: credit check, job scamsJust saw this one on Craigslist. Looked right up my alley, but when I got to the end of their online application, there was a huge gotcha. Here's the ad:
Genco Advertising is looking for smart, outgoing, friendly people to join our growing team of professionals.About Genco Advertising
GencoAdvertising.com is a new, Web 2.0 marketing company looking for individuals from all legs of life. We are a company that brides ourselves in providing all the luxuries that an employee could want including free soda and candy, lunch three days a week, a "mental break room" with TV's, video games and two pinball machines, plus LOTS of company parties. Our goal is to help our employees bound so that in the long run they are happier and more productive.Position: Marketing, Administrative, Technical
Company Responsibilities:
- Develop and execute the goals of the company;
- Develop and execute the technologies needed to drive the company;
- Develop and execute a marketing program designed for our affiliate & distribution channels.
- Support our viral marketing program;
- New product presentations, Press releases, Public relations;
- Develop a solid administrative core to guide the company internally.
- Coordinate with outside marketing agency marketing and promotional activities.Typical Qualifications:
- Is crazy about seeking results and bettering returns;
- A college degree or at least 2 years of experience in your field;
- Solid understanding of Internet marketing;
- Must possess excellent presentation and analytical skills as well as the
ability to effectively communicate both verbally and in writing;
- Ability to complete multiple tasks simultaneously.Again, we are looking for a lot of people. At least 20 in all fields, so there is probably a good chance that you have a place here at Genco. It is a very laid back place to work including casual dress, paid bus passes or parking, heck the CEO has a fish tank on his desk. Hope to see a lot of applicants to the Genco family!
Please apply by visiting our website at www. gencoadvertising. com/careers
So their site looks very legit when you come in through that URL and they send you to a very normal and legitimate looking job application form... until you get to the end.
Section 5: Financial Background Check
Genco Advertising is a new start up that deals in millions of dollars of client transactions as well as our own. There for we have been advised for ALL applicants to fill out a very simple free credit check. We are not asking for all the inner details, just the confirmation number that comes in an email after you have finished (this tells us you have completed it recently) and your FICO score. No other information will be made available to us and this information WILL BE DESTROYED after the hiring process is complete. Please note that we do not make hiring decisions strictly based on this information and we encourage everyone to apply. It is simply a tool we have choosen to use. If you have any questions on this portion, please feel free to contact us at careers@gencoadvertising.com. This part is required however. Thanks.
Click Here to Start Your Check (Opens in a new window or tab).
If you watch your status bar, you find that you end up getting referred to a service called "Credit Check Total" through a cloaked referral link. To use the service, you have to sign up for a free membership in their credit monitoring service (and provide a credit card) for which you will be billed $19.95 a MONTH ($239.40 a year - which is $60-100 a year more than the other overpriced services I looked at) if you do not cancel within 9 days.
So, when you "apply" to Genco Advertising, you're providing your home address, employment and educational history, contact information for your references, salary history, and your FICO score. Plus they make a $25 affiliate fee for "completed orders" of the monitoring service.
Seemed fishy to me, so I went to their main homepage instead of the careers page. It's very generic and the other pages on the site are just slight variations on it. Their blog links do not work. It's basically a dummy page made to look functional.
So I checked their domain registration. It was created less than 2 weeks ago. Yup, this business that's ready to hire 20 people just locked in their domain name on December 31, 2008. And they're so sure of their future success they only locked it in for a year. Despite all that, one of their non-working blog posts is dated December 10, three weeks before the domain was registered, three weeks before the site could have even existed. The address on their domain registration is not the waterfront building they have on their site, but according to Google Street View it's smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
I don't know about you, but with a blatant lie, other deceptive acts, them making you sign up for a waaaaay overpriced credit monitoring service, a two-week-old web site, and the fact that the only link for them on Google is to their site and their Craigslist ad (nothing to stories about them getting venture funding, nothing to any press releases), this is HUGELY suspicious. I can't say with 100% certaintity that it's a scam, but all these big red flags tell me that applying to Genco Advertising is a waste of your time and could end up resulting in worse than some lost time.
Hey, they even got my hopes up before I figured out they were big friggin' liars. Best of luck to you all.
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I just saw this posting and thought things seemed a little fishy on their site. Typos, no physical address at all. Redirects to the homepage from basically every link.
Googled and found your site. Glad someone else saw through this as well.
-Ron
Hmmm, yeah, their pitch struck me as more than a little odd. The credit check, the shrill tone, the incredibly annoying application form... all odd. Add on top of that the fact that they don't actually list any position details --- skills, experience, anything, and it gets odder still. The kicker for me was the fact that they have multiple typos in their craigslist posting, which to me is unacceptable for a web advertising firm.
I saw their posting on Craigslist too and found their website kinda fishy so decided to google them and found you cause of that. I'm glad I read what you said before I started filling in their application form. It really stinks that they would do something like this.
Thank you for this advice, I was about to apply!!!
So glad I googled this.... looked quite fishy to me too. Good luck to all of you on your job search!
You know whats irritating is that with the economy the way it is, people are going to be really desperate and they'll go to any length to secure something.
you gotta admit, that it was a good set up and they may see some profit unless we FLAG!!
Thank you so much for posting this! I however did apply but emailed and said I did not feel comfortable with sending in credit info over the internet. I received a reply for "Joshua" and he told me he would flag it through for me. A few hours later I just had a bad feeling about the whole thing and found this article. I knew I was making a mistake and this just proves if soemthing is too good to be true, it probably is!
I flagged the ad and made a complaint with the Internet Crime Defraud Center. I agree with the above poster. There are so many desperate people out here looking for a job that they will fall into this trap.
From here on out, I will be researhing any company that is not known to me very thoroughly before I apply!
Thank you very much for doing all this. I thought it was fishy at first sight as well, so I went on bbb.org to check them out, and google them to find their addresses, but of course nothing came up. I figured out it was a scam right away after thinking, "every page is basically the same, very simple, and there was absolutely no description for any job listed there. Of course the credit check is the spoiler, like you mentioned first!
Good job on the domain check and critical thinking. I should have thought of that too!!!
Nice Catches Everyone! I too flagged that post to Craigslist minutes after seeing it and it appears to be gone now.
The typos alone were enough to make me LOL out loud.
) There's a picture of what appears to be....Amsterdam? on their home page alongside some ominous...eastern sounding copy:
"This is company website for... people for to work in a marketing apartment...."
Bwah! hahahaha!
When I went to their site it seemed fishy -it's generic looking and features google adsense ads on the bottom. What legit advertising company does that? Anyway, thanks for confirming my thoughts on the shadiness of the site.
Well. Now that you've posted this, they have three google results. Good job, sir!
But now they have a prominent link that says "credit check job scam" along with their name pop up as the second result.
This result may not be much to their liking. Probably best for the common good, though.