A pal who was downsized from her radio job is looking for work. She’s casting a wide net, because broadcasting is getting smaller all the time. So wasn’t she surprised to get a job offer via email, having never interviewed for the position.
It all looked detailed and official but it didn’t pass the sniff test. The offer was $58k to arrange international student exchanges for a company based in Berlin that’s just entering the Canadian market.: World Student Exchange. The letterhead looked authentic. They had a website. The job was advertised on a legitimate job site. But who offers a job without so much as a phone interview?
I did a quick Google search for her and couldn’t find a whiff of this company besides its own site. My friend Eric, who is fluent in German, searched for the parent website and came up empty. She knew from the start that it was fishy but we couldn’t figure out the end game.
So she called the Halifax number to speak to her new “boss”. He offered very little in the way of information but promised to send her the numbers of contacts already working for him in other cities. That email never came.
Then we searched World Student Exchange plus the word scam, and got a couple of hits. The fun for them starts after you agree to take the position and give them your bank information for direct deposit of the salary. They overpay, and you return the difference, only to discover their deposits are retracted or insufficient. It’s an old scam done a new way and preying on the jobless. It sucks. But my friend is smart enough to have seen through it.
Now the ad is gone and so is the website. They will no doubt pop up again, perhaps in another city, trying to hook a desperate job seeker who thinks their ship has come in. And once the ship leaves port again, they’ll be worse off than they were before.
(PS. I did file a report with the OPP Fraud squad on her behalf. She didn’t want to, but I thought someone should.)