Que.es ran a piece on 12 scams used on the internet at Christmas. Most of the ones it describes can put some of your personal data at risk, but here we’ll focus on fake job offers, because they are the easiest to set up, the least suspicious to the person being scammed, and they play on a pressing need right now: jobs and money.
With fake job offers, having your money stolen or some of your personal data taken is sometimes the least of your worries. What should worry you most is identity theft. And by identity theft we don’t just mean someone hijacking your Facebook account and pretending to be you, but something far more serious.
Imagine you’re offered a job over the internet that you can do from home, and it won’t even be on a freelance contract: you’ll be properly registered with Social Security. To make the contract official, as we all know, you’d normally have to send your Social Security number, your DNI (Spain’s national ID number), your postal address, and so on.
It’s also completely normal in any job to give your bank account number so the company can pay you. With all that information, or even less, anyone could open a bank account in your name, especially now that accounts can be opened through online banking. If the scammer does it well, they could even hire themselves under your name, take out a loan in your name, have your phone line cancelled, and so on.
In Spain there are several cases of people who owe money for furniture they never bought or for phone bills they never signed up for, and even people who have been summoned to court for scams carried out on hundreds of victims when they were in fact the ones who had been scammed. Some people have even been married without knowing it. All this and more can happen.
The serious part is that once there’s a debt in your name, proving that you were scammed and getting your identity back can, as a rule, take years. In many cases, ironic as it sounds, you first have to pay off the debts to prove your innocence, even though you weren’t responsible for them. This is more serious than we think, and it’s astonishingly easy to set up a scam like this.
Some people may think they wouldn’t fall for it easily, since it all depends on knowing the company that wants to hire you. But if you got a job offer over the internet from a company like Zara (just as an example), you’d hand over your details without a second thought. The question is: was it really Zara?
The internet makes scams much easier to pull off. I’ve already told you about several very convincing emails I received. I’m sure some people take the bait, because they had two very appealing features: on the one hand you were helping someone, and on the other you stood to gain. Either that, or I passed up the chance to make almost a million euros :).
Featured image: CafeCredit.com, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
