More Employment Scams in the News - NY Times: Online Scammers Prey on the Jobless

Riva Richmond has an interesting article in the NY Times today detailing some of the online employment scams that are continuing to ensnare unwary job seekers. See, "Online Scammers Prey on the Jobless." These schemes are really just variations on the age old wire fraud con... But, of course, the reason that confidence scams work at all is that many people just aren't aware of them.

The NYT article has a nice, succinct summary of how these scams work:

"To help him [victim Claude Vera] get a home office started, Penguin [the "employer"] sent him money orders so he could buy, via money wire, the requisite laptop and other equipment from several different people. Mr. Vera, of Jamaica, New York, deposited nine United States Postal Service money orders into his Chase bank account and wired a total of nearly $8,000 to the various vendors. But he never received a laptop or anything else, and the money orders turned out to be already cashed or counterfeit. The scam consumed Mr. Vera’s tax refund and put him in the red by $6,700 to Chase, which sent his case to a collection agent."

This is something I'd covered earlier this year in the blog. See my previous posts "Email Job Offers Can Steal Your Identity" and "FBI Warns on Email and Job Scams" for more.

One resources mentioned in the NYT article was new to me, a pretty fascinating site called PhishBucket.org, a non-profit that acts as a "clearinghouse of suspicious employment-related email offers." They have a searchable list of more than 1000 different suspicious/fraudulent email job offers. 

PhishBucket's Facebook profile is also pretty interesting. One recent post points to the Better Business Bureau's warning about phony debt collector calls that are suspected to be related to some sort of mass data breach.