The recession has hit hard. Many of you reading this may have come from jobs which you thought safe – local government, skilled trades, banking and other professions – but, when it came down to the wire, they turned out to be anything but secure.
If you’ve been hunting high and low for jobs and the local Jobcentre is threatening to stop your Jobseekers’ Allowance because the Review Officer isn’t convinced you’re trying hard enough, it can be easy to be tempted by a too-good-to-be-true offer. If you are drawn in, like so many others before you, it will unfortunately only make a bad situation worse. How do you spot a bogus job offer, though?
Here are five of the most popular types of scam.
Phone scams
This can, at first glance, be difficult to spot. The job description will be plausible (because it has been copied and pasted from a genuine company’s advert, you can be sure of that) and, therefore, the rate of pay looks realistic. If you are being asked to ‘ring for application details’, is it a premium rate number? If so, you are likely to be put on hold and then abandoned while you run up a tab at up to £2 a minute. Jobcentres have announced a ban on the display of premium rate numbers and have promised more in-depth interviews with employers. That doesn’t cover newspapers and the internet, though.
Solution: Always check the number before dialling and never ring a premium rate line.
Publicity seeking
While undoubtedly irritating, this may, at first glance, appear to be relatively harmless but don’t be so easily fooled. An old trick to generate cheap publicity was to create bogus jobs and get the Jobcentres to advertise them. When applicants phoned up they were told that the vacancy had been filled but to send in their CV’s anyway (silencing them). Thus new companies acquired free advertising. A new twist on this has been for the data from these CV’s to be sold on to pressure selling organisations who then target the applicants for unwanted goods and services.
Solution: If you don’t know a company, check up on them before telling them anything significant about yourself or just give it a miss.
Pyramid selling
If you thought pyramids were a thing of the past you’d be wrong – just ask all those who’ve been caught by the pyramid-selling con. Scams typically take the form of an agency offering to find you top-paid jobs or an employer promising an above-average salary. There’s just one catch. In order to get this plum job, you have to pay for a training package (this gets the scammer part way around the problem of the Employment Agencies Act which says you can’t charge people for finding them work unless you are providing an extra service). If you send money, the ‘training package’ is merely a ‘how to place a job advert to entice other poor patsies like you’ briefing.
Solution: Unless you know exactly what you are getting, never pay anyone to help get you work – no matter how good a deal it seems to be.
The ‘Whoops!’ scam
Jobs (usually one-offs) are advertised offering large sums of money for specific tasks e.g. “We’ll pay you £500 in advance to collect someone and take them to the airport”. In advance? What can be wrong? A cheque then arrives but (typically) it will be for, say, £2,000. The company then calls you to say a terrible mistake has been made by their overworked admin department and that you should deposit the money in your bank and send them a cheque for the balance. Even if you wait a couple of days to see if it clears, the way bank accounts work, it will appear to be cleared when it isn’t. Of course, there is no-one to take to the airport and the cheque will bounce losing you your £1,500 and incurring a £25 bounced cheque fee from the bank to add insult to injury.
Solution: Be suspicious of any deal paying you in advance and never ‘refund’ anyone until your bank tells you categorically that their cheque is cleared and available for you to spend (this may take several weeks).
Phishing
You are told that you have been successful and that, in order to make sure that you are paid promptly, the company needs your bank details. Even just the barest of information can be used to take out loans secured against your house or to otherwise acquire money fraudulently.
Solution: Never give your national insurance number or bank account details out to anyone until you’ve actually started work for them – no matter what they tell you.
Please don’t think that these are the only scams – they aren’t. Sadly there are many who will cheerfully take advantage of the misery of others. If you have bogus job stories, do tell us so that others may be warned.
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