A fake job offer gone wrong

Sadly, my daughter got scammed earlier this year. She is a recent college grad from a liberal arts school, and had been working six months doing retail work after graduation.<p>Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25&#x2F;hr instead of $16&#x2F;hr doing retail was a big raise.<p>She not only lost $3000 from the scam check, she also lost her old job, having given two weeks notice and didn&#x27;t realize it was a scam until she was gone. The thing that pained her the most was the shame of having been scammed.<p>Although some red flags were there, her main blind spot was the disbelief that scammers would go to so much effort to (a) set up an entire website for the fake company, (b) were willing to spend hours in the fake interview, and (c) having her do two weeks of &quot;training&quot; courses while they waited for the laptop and other things she bought made it it cross country into their hands.

My wife almost got taken by a similar scam very recently, but for a remote content editor position. She was applying for various jobs, but one she didn&#x27;t apply reached out to her. As she had been looking for a little while, but only finding opportunities that didn&#x27;t quite fit what she needed in terms of pay, hours and schedule flexibility - when she was offered a position that checked all the boxes she was ecstatic.<p>I&#x27;ll spare the full back and forth, but the scam was somewhat similar in the setup. The send you a check, but instead of you wiring it back to them, you use the funds to purchase your remote equipment from THEIR online store. They have specific requirements on what kind of setup you need and claim it&#x27;s easier for you to buy it from them in a bundle.<p>I hadn&#x27;t been paying a lot of attention to the correspondence between her and the &quot;employer&quot;, but once she told me that I knew it wasn&#x27;t legit. Why wouldn&#x27;t they just send you equipment instead of check to buy it from them? We played along for a little bit longer, mostly because she wanted to believe it was legitimate and her pride was hurt. When they asked her to print a check from an email and then deposit that with her mobile app, she saw the writing on the wall.<p>She was very, very hurt and felt silly having to go back to friends and family and let them know she wasn&#x27;t gainfully employed, after all. But thankfully we figured it out before we were out any money.

<i>They have my drivers license which contains a lot personal information but eh... proably somewhere based in india or something, I dunno. </i><p>Freeze your credit reports with all 3 credit reporting companies. Last year someone flew into Seattle from out of state with a driver license with their photo but my info, including an old driver license number. They got a bunch of cell phones and attempted to open a number of store credit cards with it. They bought a car with a fake of someone else&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellevuebeatblog.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;64000-dodge-challenger-recovered-in-id-theft-bust&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellevuebeatblog.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;64000-dodge-challeng...</a>

You know it&#x27;s fake because the company hasn&#x27;t made you sit through 6 interviews with random panel guests then ghosted you for 3 month then low balled you and put a 24 hour expiry on the offer. Bonus credibility points for only giving half of the question during the whiteboard session only to casually remember remember at the very end while grading harshly for missing that.<p>If the offer hasn&#x27;t been rescinded at least once it&#x27;s probably a red flag as well.

As someone who has worked a corporate job for a while, this is all red flags _BUT_ if you have not worked for a corporation, and you really need a job, you may be motivated to dismiss those little warning signs so you can get paid.<p>Scams don&#x27;t work because scammers are smart; scams work because scammers exploit our motivations. Beware of charity scams this holiday season.

To be honest, one can easily realize that this &quot;Marc Cannon&quot; is a fake with the amount of spelling and grammatical errors he makes. Real professionals do not make spelling and grammar errors such as:<p>&quot;Do you have any other question ?&quot; &quot;Good morning how are you this morning.&quot; &quot;I will send you later&quot; &quot;Good morning, How are you doing today ?&quot; &quot;This is very disrespectful and all director are to meet you for training on monday and you&#x27;re &#x27;suppose&#x27; to have all your materials before then&quot;<p>It was practically a dead giveaway when the guy used &quot;autonation.com@proton.me&quot;, because the guy doesn&#x27;t have access to the domain&#x27;s email, he probably didn&#x27;t even understand what you were saying.

Great job figuring out it was a scam but honestly, it’s crazy that these things still work on anyone all the way in 2022. You would think that by now every human being that walks the earth would know that whenever someone you don’t know sends you “money” and then requests you send it back (or to another party) in a different form, it’s <i>always</i> a scam. There should be some ceremony whenever someone turns 16 or something, where you just get taught this and that’s the end of this scam. Insane that people still fall for this!<p>Same for the gift card scams. <i>No legit business or government on earth in any industry asks for gift cards as payment!</i> This is like an absolute ironclad fact of the universe. But so many people still fall for it!

In general, a commercial entity will rarely use a free email service like Google mail. And the ones that do, are too small to keep you employed very long.<p>And yes, these scams show up anywhere there is no traceable financial history to the advertiser. Also, did you know using a staffing agent is pretty much a guaranteed %15 to %30 pay cut from if you applied directly to a company hr contact. Note too, that once you use a staffing agent, that often your CV can no longer be considered when directly submitted to a firm that also recently posted on the agents service.<p>Asking employees for money sounds like a ridiculous premise, and rather cheeky if it is normal in your area.

Not losing anything but coming this close to getting scammed can feel very embarrassing. Thank you for putting this up to warn others. I can tell from the intro that you still feel duped. Yeah, it seems obvious in retrospect, but it really is very understandable. We want to believe it’s true so badly that we’re willing to look past all the red flags.

I haven&#x27;t gone through all the comments, but am I the only one in here who doesn&#x27;t want to read past 2nd email? If someone sent me some shady email address, then that shady email address sent me a message saying, &quot;Hey it&#x27;s me that shady email address owner, but I can&#x27;t get to it, so I am using ANOTHER shady address.&quot;<p>Someone convince me this post of his is not a waste of time.

For everyone who is commenting on the grammar&#x2F;spelling mistakes, this is on-purpose. It dramatically increases the positive predictive value of their scam (i.e. the probability that the victim they have messaged on day 1 will go through with the wire transfer on day 5). It does this by pre-filtering the general population for gullible individuals.

There&#x27;s this magician called Jamy Ian swiss that I often watched. He would do a card trick and fool you. Then he tells you how he does the trick, and still fools you. It doesn&#x27;t matter how much he tells you, you&#x27;ll still get fooled because &quot;Nobody thinks that magicians will work this hard to fool you.&quot;<p>These scam tricks still work in 2022 because we think scammers are always on the nose. We never think how hard they will work just to fool us.

Yeah I&#x27;ve encountered at least a couple of recruiter companies who were really weird and gave me bad vibes and decided not to continue with them, trust your gut, what made me think twice about these recruiters:<p>1- Unusually bad English (Not talking about normal immigrant English like mine, but like really bad, no way someone hired this person to recruit for these kind of positions). 2- These `recruiters` talk in very low volume, I had to tell them to speak louder, my guess is that they are in an office with a lot of people doing the same. 3- They ask you about weird stuff in their e-mail communication, like sign something in early phases of interviewing. 4- When tell you when they will call you and the number is flagged as &#x27;SCAM LIKELY&#x27; then they tell you to save the number, super red flag<p>After that I googled the companies &#x2F; job postings and were super generic with bad reviews in glassdoor.

Do you trust any work related email sent to you using a gmail account? Cause I absolutely don&#x27;t. I work in a very very tiny startup and even this guy sent me the acceptance mail through his company site.

Are cheques even used for anything except for fraud anymore?<p>Open call: Anyone out there paying or receiving payment with cheque in the last ten years?

I think it&#x27;s quite simple: If you are starting a job, the company pays you. Never ever should you spend a significant amount of money before receiving the first pay check.

One thing what does not help is that legit companies and businesses act as scammers. I receive also a valid calls from companies and email which look 100% as scam.<p>Just recently I got call from hospital about upcoming my procedure (I did not answer — all unverified calls go to vmail) and when I called back the hospital and they had no clue. But it was a valid call: they outsourced all these things to company x which outsourced that to company y. All they cared is that company which does this have HIPPA compliance - all other things (unverified phone numbers, central system, etc.) whatever.

In this holiday season, remember to always check your gift cards for fake barcodes stickers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcmag.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;new-gift-card-scam-uses-barcode-stickers-to-steal-your-cash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcmag.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;new-gift-card-scam-uses-barcode-s...</a>

&gt; If you have any advice please send it to me.<p>I would submit this to law enforcement. Wire fraud is a crime that is often investigated, and the more examples of these scams they have the better.

Pretty common scam, and one that I&#x27;ve run into multiple times, including at the very start of my freelance IT work right out of high school. In that case, a &quot;business&quot; wanted some computers fixed, but they needed to be released from some courier. The &quot;business&quot; stated they would send a check for me to deposit, and that I would then pay the courier on my end to release the hardware to be delivered for me to repair and send back. I hadn&#x27;t seen this scam before, but I knew something was fishy; after all, if they&#x27;re able to write me a check, why wouldn&#x27;t they be able to pay this courier themselves? I stood my ground, insisting that delivering the hardware for repair was their responsibility, and theirs alone. The &quot;business&quot; sent the check anyway; I shredded it and ghosted them. I only learned later how common such check-bouncing scams indeed are, and how big of a bullet I had dodged.

Oh no! Even after the rude awakening they’re still erring on the side of trusting.<p>At least put a credit freeze on. It’s easy! What’s done is done so no sense beating oneself over it or worrying, but take precaution!<p>&gt;”They have my drivers license which contains a lot personal information but eh... proably somewhere based in india or something, I dunno.”<p>While hopefully not likely the worst case scenario can be a nightmare but doing two new actions now can help. 1. File a police report! 2. Put credit freeze!<p>And a third action that everyone should do, request the free credit report a couple times a year and inspect. But makes sure it’s the legit site and also free.<p>These actions will help prevent this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;story&#x2F;2022-10-26&#x2F;identity-theft-nightmare" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;story&#x2F;2022-10-26...</a>

Same things happen in Germany with fake home rental offers. They even use stolen IDs to prove themselves.

What would be useful is a clear explanation of the workings of these scams - I mean it took me halfway through this thread to work out he was pressured to repay an uncleared cheque.<p>And the &quot;sex in your area&quot; scam someone mentioned - I simply assumed that sort of thing is real (some kind of scuzzy meetup thing) as opposed to a scam (not sure how it works - presumably pay up before getting the number of the gorgeous woman who wants sex now! Admittedly cannot see a big difference between that and reputable dating agencies :-)<p>So yeah a public safety website for scams might be useful.<p>How do they all work?

Two of my friends got the same email upon applying: offer to interview, PDF interview, offered job position, asked to sign offer letter, and offer to send a check.<p>It easily stood out as a scam, as I have read tons of similar stories on reddit.<p>What stood out to me is that they had applied on Indeed via LinkedIn, yet gotten into this scam loop. As Indeed a reputable place, curious, I applied to the same position but was rejected in a day, and my rejection letter came from official AutoNation address.

I don&#x27;t see what Indeed and Autonation have to do with you being scammed. Autonation looks like a legit company that the scammers impersonated.<p>There are numerous giveaways and red flags in the process, the major one is them using a non-corporate e-mail address. I interviewed with dozens of companies, that never happens. Also there are many spelling and grammatical errors, no serious company will present itself like that.<p>A basic search reveals that Marc Cannon is EVP Chief CX Officer at Autonation. Do you think he is involved is hiring engineers so early in the process?<p>One round of interviews to get hirred? Sorry, that never happens either (unless you work in crypto).<p>Asked to pay for equipement in order to start work? Again, that never happens. Also, you transfered money to Destin Ellis? Why is that not a company? Where is the invoice? Why does the equipement go to them and not to you?<p>Also, the offer letter is signed by Manfred Eissner which is a Brand Designer (on a simple search on LinkedIn) and not the CTO of the company. Not to mention that CTO&#x27;s are not botherer with these offer letters usually, it&#x27;s the head of HR who deals with these.<p>Also, an offer letter is much longer and detailed.<p>Some basic reasearch would have stopped you from getting scammed. I&#x27;m sorry that this is not what you want to hear, but scammers usually throw the bait and the most desperate buy it. What you show above is that you are not experienced with the workings of a corporation and were quite desperate to get hired. Try to recover the money by contacting the bank and after that maybe it&#x27;s a good time to reflect why you fell for this trap and how to improve your reasoning in the future.

I think you&#x27;re in the U.S., and if so immediately freeze your credit so that they can&#x27;t take out new credit in your name. They seem pretty motivated and they have a lot of your identity information. You can learn how to freeze and unfreeze your credit for free at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nerdwallet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;finance&#x2F;how-to-freeze-credit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nerdwallet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;finance&#x2F;how-to-freeze-cre...</a>.<p>Then pull all three of your credit reports to check for anomalies. You can do that for free at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annualcreditreport.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annualcreditreport.com</a>. Right now you can do it for free every week. In non-pandemic times it&#x27;s once a year. Do NOT agree to any upsells for additional features or protection to get your free report; it&#x27;s not required to just get your reports.

I&#x27;m confused - doesn&#x27;t everyone immediately junk it when they use throwaway gmail addrs?

The bad grammar was a tell for me - did not even come close to being plausibly from a native English speaker. That said, I can understand how someone who very much needs&#x2F;wants a job could could fall prey. I hope things work out for this guy.

<p><pre><code> 11. I saw a ton of red flags in regards to grammar and spelling but brushed it off, maybe it was just some foreign recruiter, whatever, I make typos all the time </code></pre> That&#x27;s part of the scam though, it&#x27;s made on purpose

Meta: HN should show subdomain for pages.dev

I got scammed twice in my life by people from the same country (will let you guess the country). What bugs me the most is the people blaming the victims (oh how can you fall for that..) which gives some sense that scammers are &quot;smart&quot;, when they actually exploited&#x2F;abused the most valuable thing in a functioning society: Trust, that would drag the society way back because now you can&#x27;t have nice things, you have to doubt, distrust everything you deal with.

“Our company AutoNation received your resume and application in respect of our job posting”<p>That’s it for me, once I see language like that I know it is 100% a scam and e-mail goes to trash.

There&#x27;s only the archaic financial system in the US to blame that creates more opportunities for scam.

Very revealing how self interest can blind a type of person to an obvious scam. This guy got lucky but they almost had him. I can’t help but think of crypto.

These people are the same ones targeting the elderly. Now they’re targeting people in financial distress who have no real work experience in a corporate environment. These scammers are garbage because they specifically target the weak and vulnerable<p>I’m glad that OP didn’t fall for it, and I’m impressed that he would publicly post a detailed account despite the embarrassment. It’s a nice public service

What would you have job posting sites do differently to validate employers? This is an extremely difficult problem.

Maybe if all company data was in git(hub) it could help check who adds a company, and from which source come the jobs <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joblisttoday&#x2F;data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joblisttoday&#x2F;data</a>

&gt;&gt; You will receive your duties everyday via email<p>This to me is a dealbreaker. I would rather die than have daily tasks assigned.<p>As a jr dev this may be tolerable for a short while but after umpteen years no way!

I think recently I dodged a scam too, i had an interview with a guy with camera off, website without tax code and all blanked off whois for the domain website

Honestly, I don&#x27;t know how you can fall for this

Time pressure is always a red flag, they will try to give you time pressure to try to switch off your logic and just do it right away.

This was an almost incoherent, very poorly organized, and hard to read story.<p>Needs another pass by the editor before I can recommend anyone waste their time.

I gotta that say by email 2, I&#x27;d be like &quot;I don&#x27;t work for people who send corporate emails from gmail&quot; and ghosted them.

Your rate of $40 an hour is way off; I hired a jr&#x2F;mid c# dev @115k (fully remote) recently.

Could anyone be so kind as to comment a tl;dr of this one? I am curious but it was very long and I haven&#x27;t the time at this moment.

The Indian scammers have unseated Nigerian princes with oil fields.

&gt; How much do you want for this position?<p>&quot;What&#x27;s the range?&quot;<p>Scam or no scam, you shouldn&#x27;t be telling them your desired rate&#x2F;salary; you should be asking them what the range is for the position they&#x27;re hiring for.<p>It&#x27;s like a cop asking you &quot;do you know why I pulled you over?&quot; Don&#x27;t volunteer information, just ask &quot;Why did you pull me over?&quot;