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June 2, 2019 07:34 pm

Scammers Try Elaborate Fake Job Interviews On Google Hangouts

Ars Technica documents "a new breed of digital fraudsters" using a complicated scam to prey on white-collar job-seekers. It involves setting up a fake job interview process and the promises of high-paying work:Like most successful cons, this one involved gaining the willing consent of its victim through some combination of greed, fear, or desperation... The recruiter was responding to the application I had submitted a day earlier for a remote-work tech writer position at a biotech firm... The following day, I logged onto Google Hangouts, properly dressed and groomed for the video chat I'd been preparing for. To my surprise, I learned that the interview would be conducted using Hangouts' text messaging service... After a long briefing about the company, its research, and the oncology treatments it was developing, Mark began the formal part of the interview by introducing himself as the assistant chief human resources officer of the company and describing the duties I'd be expected to fulfill... But there were two questions that seemed out of place. They wanted to know which bank I used and whether it supported electronic deposits, a process in which you deposit checks by taking pictures of them with your Smartphone. It seemed like an odd thing to ask, but I told them that my bank did accept electronic deposits and moved on to the next question... Within a few minutes of submitting my answers, Mark informed me that I'd passed the interview and would receive a formal offer to work from my home as a copywriter/proofreader. My pay would be $45/hour during my one-week training and evaluation period, stepping up to $50/hour when I became an employee. The scammer even assigned fake work -- editing a monograph on cancer treatment protocols following the company's style guide -- while casually promising to send along a check to purchase the necessary high-end equipment for the job. The job-seeker was instructed to scan their deposit receipt and then email the image to the scammers. (And the check was issued from a private Catholic girls' school in Southern California -- while the job-seeker was instructed to make their purchase from "preferred vendors.") Though the scam ultimately wasted 'more than two days worth of my time," at least it revealed something about today's online job sites. "After some more digging, it quickly became apparent that the False Flag Employer scam I nearly fell for is an increasingly common type of cybercrime."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/A8blXq5XRmw/scammers-try-elaborate-fake-job-interviews-on-google-hangouts

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