Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2012, in the middle of the economic crisis in Spain. The “current situation” and the desperation of job seekers it mentions refer to that moment.
FACUA (a Spanish consumer rights association) warns that the crisis is sharpening the wits of scammers looking to make money by swindling the most gullible. To pull off a scam, all you need is a clever mind (the scammer) and an ambitious person (the future victim) or a desperate one (the poor future victim).
Given the current crisis and how desperate many people are to find work, scammers are focusing on job offers. Admittedly, in some cases no scam is being committed in the legal sense: certain details that, ethically, the candidate ought to know are simply left out. For example:
1. Earn big money working from home: These offers usually come from legitimate companies, and the catch is that to earn a reasonable amount of money you would, in some cases, need to put in more than 28 hours a day. Obviously, a day doesn’t have that many hours. That said, some of these companies are no longer on the right side of the law: they ask for payment upfront, either to cover shipping costs or as a deposit on the materials they’re going to send you.
If you have to send money upfront in order to work, be very careful.
2. Pyramid schemes: These businesses usually sell you the idea that you’ll get rich in no time, but the truth is that to get started you have to make yourself a bit poorer and buy the first batch of products out of your own pocket. Once you’ve made that investment, you have to try to “offload” it on your friends, neighbours, relatives and so on. So if you do get into this kind of business, at least try to make sure the product you buy is something you could use yourself if the worst comes to the worst, in case you can’t sell a single unit, which is usually the most likely outcome.
Once again, many of these companies are usually legitimate; they simply leave out how hard the business model is to make work afterwards. The profits of pyramid companies (which are far from small) usually come from “picking off” a percentage of people who buy because a friend or relative who took the bait a few weeks earlier talked them into it.
3. Job offers with a premium-rate phone number: These offers can be reported to the authorities, although the company or person behind them is rarely tracked down. They’re usually advertised online or in the press and offer an eye-catching job. They don’t ask you to send a CV; instead, they ask you to phone the company.
A person or an answering machine will try to keep you on the line for as long as possible. By the time you discover that the job doesn’t really exist, you’ll have spent an average of 35–50 € on the call.
4. Jobs abroad: Job offers abroad come up regularly, and in fact many foreign companies are looking for workers. But if you have to pay anything in advance for administration or travel costs in order to work abroad, make no mistake: you’re the victim of a scam.
5. Make easy money online: Let’s be clear about this one. Some companies pay you to receive advertising in your email inbox, on condition that you open it. However you look at it, these companies scam in one of two ways.
To begin with, they’re scamming the advertisers, who have hired them to find potential customers interested in buying their products, and who pay for every click someone makes on their ads. What these advertisers don’t know is that the clicks they’re getting come from people who have no interest in buying anything; on top of that, those people are getting a commission for each click. In most cases, these companies charge the advertisers and never pay the person who clicks. As a rule, the advertiser soon realises it’s being scammed.
How can you tell when you’re being conned?
In the end, what counts is common sense, although there are a few patterns that never fail. If a job offer uses the words “easy money”, you can be sure it’s a con, because easy money with no effort is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist.
If you see the words “Get rich”, you’re looking at another con. Believe me, if someone had a system for making you rich easily, they’d keep it for their friends and family. I don’t think they’d be offering it to the whole world.
And finally, when someone offers a job, it’s taken for granted that the candidate needs to work and probably has little money, so a legitimate company isn’t going to ask you for money upfront. If you have to pay to work, it isn’t a job.
Further reading
- Watch out for these two scams spreading online
- Virtual girlfriend swindles a man out of 200,000 dollars
Featured image: A Disappearing Act, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
