Work-at-Home Scam - January 18, 2008 Example  (Lotus)

Please be sure to read my Work-at-Home Scams Home Page

Things I Did, Below

I, personally, receive email in HTML format. The following was received (and looked) like I received it. At the time, I was more interested in the message than the headers and do not have the original. This is a copy I forwarded to myself as I sent it to my father.

• I removed my email addresses. These came to various accounts and some no longer exist. There are places on this site you can get hold of me if you wish or need to. They are protected from spambots using JavaScript, but all you have to do is click on them.
• All scammer and related email addresses, and any actual website links have been changed, at least putting spaces into them. They appear as underlined blue links, though they aren't.
• Any notes I added in the actual letter are in square brackets ("[" "]"), are bold, red in color, and highlighted. If what I found "behind the links" (email or website) are different than what was displayed, I will include them in this type of note.
• All spelling, spacing, line-wrapping, and punctuation errors are the ones that appeared in the original received email. (I may or may not analyze some or all of these.)

Scam Example
Received 01/18/2008

This was spam email, as while I have a resume at CareerBuilder at this time, it was sent to an email address which I do NOT use for job search. (I just double-checked.)

NOTE: To allow search engines to find them, I've left the links in this email. Be careful if you check them out for yourself.

NOTE: The email mentions "attachments". There were none.

Email Headers
Received 01/17/2008

Time to check the website. There was no link to a company site in the email, and a Google search for lts-jobs.com showed no sites at all. (There WAS a Google Cache page for a page, but it was a setup page, informing the owner to upload their page to the site.) The only other page I found was a warning about this site being a scam.

Red Flags, for Me

As I said on the Work-at-Home Scams Home Page, I've been receiving so many of these, and with other things on my plate, have not had time to completely analyze the information, above. Here are a number of things I look at and for:

What raises the red flags for me?

1. From the email itself:
   1. I have received NUMEROUS job offers, in the last couple of weeks for the same type of job, many purporting to be responding to my resume on CareerBuilder. While I am looking for a job, and have a resume there, the email address I use there is NOT the one to which this email may be sent.
   2. Based on the job mentioned in the email and/or at website, I DO fit their "position requirements", but so do most executives and menial workers! (But, in most cases, the email says they sent it to me based on my resume ... which leans heavily toward computer programming. So how does that make me "good for vacancies they have"?
   3. In many cases, the description of the process for both positions is the same as KNOWN reshipper/money transfer and strictly reshipper work-at-home job scams:
      1. Reshipper/Money Transfer: Deposit checks into your current or a new account you set up, withdraw cash from the account, wire the cash overseas. The problem occurs when the banks find the checks are bad/forged, pull the amount of the check out of the account, and demand that YOU cover the rest of the amount. If you don't, you may be prosecuted for passing bad checks.
      2. Strictly Reshipper: "They want you to receive packages and reship them somewhere else. The goods will have been obtained fraudulently, and they're just using you to make the shipping address appear local. You will be aiding fraud." If you aren't required to "check" the goods, they could be drugs; counterfeit money, stocks or bonds, etc. They may also "slam" you with multiple deliveries of packages you must "break down" and ship, and, when you can't handle it, or figure out they're scamming you, you end up with a bunch of packages that YOU have to cart to the cops or Postal Inspector.
   4. Spacing, grammar, spelling, and word usage errors are extremely rare from a legitimate site offering a job. Numerous people have read those, from HR to Legal to the person who wrote it. SOMEONE would catch the errors.
   5. The email address FROM which the email is sent is NOT the same as the company offering the job. While I realize that consultant and contracting companies could be sending these emails out, there is absolutely NO indication that this is from anyone but the company, itself, and the vast majority would have their own domains.
2. From the email headers:
   1. The email address FROM which it was sent is normally from either a free email account, or from one that doesn't come anywhere near the company name. Again, why aren't they sent from a domain reflecting their name? ... and why can't I simply reply to the email to get information?
   2. Use GeoBytes Spam Locator (just cut-and-paste the email headers) to find from WHERE this email came. It will most-likely be a foreign country (I live in the US), and will probably NOT be the same country as the job. It will also probably not have ANYTHING to do with either the site in question, or the person who emailed the job to me.
3. From the WhoIs of the (apparent) site:
   1. The majority of the time, email for the registrant, administrator, billing, and technical contacts are all from a free email account. While this in itself doesn't mean much, it does raise a flag to look further.
   2. The snail-mail address given for those contacts is normally in a foreign country, again, not associated with either the site in question, or the email addresses - FROM which it was sent, or TO which I am to reply. Many times they will be in Russia! (Again, not much... )
   3. Pay attention to the contact phone number(s) given. In many cases, they are "fudged" (1-222-333-4444) or foreign and made to look very American (our format is as just used, though many simply enter it as 1.2345678909, obscuring the format used (for example, +4.8223334455 would be from Poland (format +48 xx xxx xx xx (outside Poland) [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2B48]
4. From the website:

   1. If there is a valid website, a check of the contact numbers area code (simply search for "area code" (with quotes) and the first three digits of the phone number (minus the leading ONE, if it's 11 digits).

5. With such a mish-mash of addresses and contact locations, it makes me wonder even MORE why I am receiving an email for this job. And with so many red-flags... GEEZE!

End Notes

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