A Year in the Life of an Online Job Scam Posted on May 16, 2008 at 05:20:24 PM by TeamAdmin
Job scams are as old as jobs themselves. In past years, con artists would put a bad job ad up, fool a job seeker into giving up their money, and then physically move on to a new city. Now bad job ads have moved onto the Internet, with devastating consequences. The very things that make the Internet so effective for job seekers -- speed, convenience, and a nationwide job search from a computer screen -- are the same things that make it effective for fraudulent activity. Job seekers and job sites have unfortunately been targeted with sophisticated triangulation scams that move rapidly and seamlessly through a selection of job sites from coast to coast in a matter of days.
In this report, The World Privacy Forum is publishing the first documentation of the detailed path of an online job scam as it worked its way across multiple job sites over the course of a year, from July 16, 2003 to July 7, 2004. The documentation of this scam, its evolution, and its impact on the victims it has left behind provides the first clear longitudinal view of the scope, patterns, and severity of the online job fraud problem.
The particular scam documented in this report is not a "mom and pop" job. It is larger and more sophisticated than it appears on the surface. The footprints of this scam are documented and presented in the "Evolution of a Job Scam" timeline in Section IV. This scam is dangerous and has been perversely effective in defrauding its victims.
One of its victims got fired for simply being duped by the scam. Another person's bank account numbers were stolen and used. As of June 2, 2004, the World Privacy Forum has confirmed that there is a worst-case scenario connected with this scam: a victim of this scam has been arrested, indicted, and now faces trial for criminal charges directly resulting from being apparently tricked by this bad job ad into forwarding money that had been stolen. (For a description of how the scam works, and why this victim was charged with a crime, see the "Payment Transfer" discussion in Section II.)
It is important to note that an indictment of a job fraud victim represents a sea change in the "grace period" job scam victims had been enjoying until now. Just as identity theft victims had to fight a hard battle to help people understand their plight, the same challenges now face job seekers victimized by slick, organized job scams.
The World Privacy Forum views this change in approach to victims as a tipping point for the job search industry. The stakes for correcting the job fraud problem have become very high, and this complex issue must now be addressed in the strongest possible manner that provides the most effective proactive protection to job seekers.
But getting rid of job fraud will not be simple or easy. Job fraud is a stubbornly complex issue, and it is deeply and subtly intertwined with challenging data privacy issues. It is also an issue that extends beyond online job sites to the entire job search sector.
For at least the past 11 or 12 years, the Net -- more specifically the Web -- has been home to hundreds of job sites and millions of job ads. Internet job distributor eQuest estimates that in 2002, it sent out over 24 million job ads to an array of approximately a thousand job sites (1). Those ads represent many good opportunities for job searching.
The virtues of an Internet job search, in the hands of criminals, have become a nightmare for both the job seekers and the job sites alike. While in past years con artists just stole money from a handful of job seekers city-by-city, now computer con artists are stealing money, identities, bank account numbers, and SSNs across the nation with relative ease. Job scams are so effective in the online medium that it is nearly impossible to catch up with the criminals until after the damage is done.
Job sites, for their part, do not simply throw open their doors to let theives steal resumes or to post fake jobs. In fact, many job sites have been in the process of seeking strong solutions to the growing problem of job fraud for well over a year or more (2). It should be noted that not all job sites have a history of fraud complaints, but many do.
Since November 2003, the World Privacy Forum has been conducting a study of job site scams and related resume database privacy issues. Researchers have been working to quantify the overall percentage of job scams on job sites, figure out how they operate, discover their patterns, and find ways of circumventing the scams. The point is to protect current job seekers as well as to create a research-based understanding of the problem the job search industry faces.
Part I of the study involves a longitudinal study of a single scam to discover long-term patterns of scam evolution and activity. Part II of the study focuses on quantifying the amount and type of job scam activity.
The preliminary findings of Pt. I of this report are both positive and negative. There has been improvement, but more needs to be done. The goal of this report is to help give consumers and organizations the information they need to begin to combat this complex, stubborn problem before there are any more victims.
As part of this report, the World Privacy Forum asked the largest job sites to respond officially with details of what they are doing right now to combat job fraud. This report contains their detailed responses in Section V, and it includes a timeline detailing each documented incidence of the scam described in this report (Section IV).
The World Privacy Forum made a good faith effort prior to the publication of this report to notify each site where researchers found and documented the fraudulent jobs.