Work-at-home scam steals hope from the jobless
PORTLAND, Ore. – Teresa Cozad of Longview has been out of work for a year. Her husband has been struggling too, laid off three times from a similarly struggling Portland-based truck plant.
So, it has been back to basics for this family – all while trying to raise two teenage girls.
"You don't have movie nights anymore, you play cards, you play games," Cozad said. "You sell things that have been sitting in the garage, becuase you need the money instead."
To collect her unemployment insurance coverage, Cozad is required to make contact with at least three potential employers a week. So, in addition to the usual job-seeking sites like Monster.com, she recently turned to Craigslist.com.
"I found a job for an office assistant working at home," Cozad tells us.
It is the kind of work she has done in the past, and this job posting was for the reputable non-profit Rotary International.
"They had the President's name on there, and an actual employee name of the person you're talking to," she said.
The e-mail Cozad received after sending in her resume said: "An interview will be conducted online. You are requested to download and set up a Yahoo instant messenger account and add the online HR manager, Mr. Charles Baldwin, on his Yahoo i.d charlesbaldwin2008."
To Cozad, that sounded a bit strange: "Normally you don't talk to somebody through instant messenger, but I figured – with all the companies having over 4,000 people applying for jobs – this was one way to ween things out."
She engaged in the online interview, but not for long.
"As we went along, something just started feeling not right," Conzad said. After a brief set of questions and answers, about her clerical skills and her integrity as a dedicated and honest person, her interviewer took a break.
"He said, 'Let me go take your info and resume, and talk to the gentleman again.'"
Ten minutes later he returned, and told Cozad she was hired.
"I thought that was odd because, again, I never saw them, they never met me," she said.
After explaining some of the basic duties her job would entail, such as taking calls from donors and entering their information in the Rotary database. "Mr. Baldwin" told Cozad they would send her a check to purchase the equipment she would need to work at home.
"That's when I said I needed to speak to a local rep, in person, before I accept this," Cozad said. "And that's when the conversation ended."
Cozad can laugh about it now, since she narrowly avoided what is now being known as an "employment twist" on a very old scam: the old money-transfer scam. When they didn't respond back, "I was relieved in a way, because this was not right and I caught it before it went further."
Oregon Attorney General John Kroger has seen it in its many forms before, where a victim recieves a fake check for a lot of money, then is asked to send a small part of it back.
"People want the big check, so they send the small amount to the scam artist," Kroger said. "Then the big check bounces."
The scam artist then can make off with what usually amounts to $100 to $200 sent their way. It doesn't sound like much, but Kroger says it can pay of, since the scammers work on a large scale, trying to reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
"That is the real challenge in the middle of this recession," Kroger said. "Unemployment is so high in Oregon that people are desperate, and scam artists have come out of the woodwork to try and take advantage of people at that moment of desperation."
"I'm sure a lot of people, like me, are really tight on their budget and, with what we have left, we're scrimping," Cozad said. "And they're going to take that from us. To take what little hope we have left away is wrong."
KATU's on-your-side advice
Here are three steps to figuring out whether you're dealing with a legitimate job offer.
- Before giving any personal information, contact the organization directly and ask for the human resource department. That department should know if a job position is open, and even may be able to help arrange a real phone or face-to-face interview.
- Be wary about interviews conducted entirely by e-mail or instant messenger. Since online scam artists often operate from countries outside of the U.S. they will be trying to keep their international phone bill down.
- Call your state's Department of Justice Consumer Protection hotline. Agents there can perform their own investigation into whether or not a job offer is legitimate, and get back to you with their results.
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