Scam Jobs! Too good to be true? Probably!

Okay, this is going to be one of my scam posts. The biggest problem that I’ve been facing since starting the trek to a professional career is facing the reality that so many people out there are willing to take advantage of you. They prey on the fact that we are currently in a bad economy and that millions of people are jobless (10% unemployment doesn’t count the number of people who have just given up on looking for jobs or are looking for full-time employment). These people are the ones who promise you great jobs with little or no experience needed. They offer great pay and things like “be your own boss” or “unlimited earning potential” and tell you that “any major is welcome." These are usually jobs postings listed in sales/marketing - stuff like financial advisor for a no-name company or inside/outside sales associate. The jobs usually entail literally cold calling people, finding potential customers from the general population. They vary from job to job, but many of them are basically pyramid schemes. You go out, sell a product, and get a very small percentage of the profit. The company does not really back you up and unless you’re great at it, you will not earn any money. In fact, many companies will charge you for potential leads if you cannot find any yourself. This is not to put down the whole profession, rather the advertising of these jobs. I will write a much more in-depth article on financial advisors and my experience with that, but today will be about real scam jobs.

One thing I forgot to mention when I was talking about monsterjobs.com was that once you publish your profile and make it public, anyone can look at it. That's usually a good thing, but it also allows scammers to find it too. These scammers are usually targeting a specific group of people and having a search function like monster at their disposal is definitely something they're willing to pay for. So I received a phone call last week from a cell phone in DC. I picked up and had a 10 minute phone call with someone named Allen. He told me that he worked for a company called DoingWap. He asked me if I was still looking for a job, as they had a business analyst position opening up. He also asked me what my visa situation was. That was the first thing that turned my BS alarm on. Why would he ask me what my visa situation was? In times like these, almost no companies are offering to sponsor foreigners. He went on ask me if I spoke Chinese. I said I did and he proceeded to explain the rest in Chinese. I was told that they were this great new company in New Jersey (remember how the phone number is a cell phone from DC?) and that they were offering free four week training in all aspects of their business from finance to tons of IT things. He told me that they were looking for people who were fluent in Chinese and English and were able to understand financial data. I have to say, from the phone call, I was really impressed. The program seems really great... wait, did he just say free training? If you get hired shouldn’t your training be free? What kind of company asks you to pay for training? I told him that I was very interested in this position. He asked when was the earliest I could come in for an interview, and after scheduling for Tuesday, he told me he would email me more information. After the call, I was very excited - the job sounded great, I was able to use all the things that I had just learned in college and take advantage of the fact that I am fluent in Chinese. Fifteen minutes later I got an email:




First of all, there are four different font types and three colors in fewer than 500 words. The second sentence has spelling mistakes. Already this thing starts looking fishy. And the training looks insane. I would literally have to eat, sleep, and drink information for a whole month to learn all that. No way in hell anyone can cover that much stuff in-depth in under one month. No freaking way, especially if I was a foreign student without a native grasp on English (which is who they were mainly looking for, I later realized). He was nice enough to give me the website address in the first sentence. I went there. For a quick second it actually looks really professional. But the first thing I noticed about Doingwap was this:



Though the website looks really nice and creative, all the words are filler. They don’t tell you anything about what the company actually does. There’s also no way that they could’ve worked for so many Fortune 500 companies with a crappy tagline like, “You will have definitely good start with us!” It would be like me opening a Chinese restaurant with the motto “Now we free of poison I promise!”

Wellm needless to say, my BS alarmed turned on full-blast and I decided to look for information about this company. A quick google search shows nothing. This company has done itself a great favor by inundating job websites with fake jobs. They apparently have jobs throughout the US and are paying people with absolutely no experience very well. Following many pages of search I finally came upon one thing. Another blog, actually! In Michael Hine’s blog he talks about having almost the same experience as me, except that instead of offering free training, the company offered free training with a $1000 deposit. Alarms are blaring now. Anytime a company hires you and expects you to pay for training, run away. Why? Because it’s a retarded hiring process and also because it’s most likely a scam. If I was hiring people who I felt would be great for the job, why would I charge them for training? That would be like getting hired to pay your employer - it's basically indentured servitude. So with that tidbit of information, I decided that there had to be more out there. So I googled “Doingwap Scam” and lo and behold the second link led me to an indeed forum about another company called Hd Dimension. Wait… isn’t that a different company? Actually, not exactly! From the forum posts the two companies seem very similar. Here are some of the complaints:



Hmm, seems like the same practice… offering training, the promise of a great job, and of course people complaining about how they haven’t heard back from these people. Great, though if you read further down you begin to notice that the scammers actually make fake accounts on Indeed and post things like this:



First of all, who the hell would hire someone in the USA for a job that requires you to consult other Americans, when your English is like this:

• “I think it’s great with HD Dimension Corp to safe a prospect Future……I know what is the value of HD Dimension Corp …… In Wall Street”

You know what this reminds me of? French class in high school when I'd forget to study for an exam and bullshited by adding er at the end of every verb. Je watcher le television.

And if that wasn’t enough, when you look carefully at the bottom post, you can see it’s clearly written by someone who’s been scammed. He knows how it works and he’s also 100% sure that it’s fake.

So how did I know that HD dimension and DoingWap are the same company? Well, if you go to the last page on the forum, you’ll see that people have been getting phone calls from HD Dimension that seem suspiciously like the one I received from DoingWap. So, I decided to check out the similarities between the companies. The first similarity is that they both have very snazzy websites - everything looks really professional. Another thing is that the content on both websites are the same. They offer the same jobs and all the descriptions are exactly the same.

One more glaring similarity, which was basically the nail in the coffin:




Really? They have the same address and phone number! That’s absolutely ridiculous!!! At this point, I was 1000% sure this was a fake job. I decided to find out the extent of their scam. The only way was to contact them again, so I immediately wrote back:



Of course there's been no response email. I’m supposed to have the interview tomorrow (I'm obviously not going), and still nothing.

The lesson I've learned from this is that if it sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. Though many of us are desperate for jobs, we deserve better than scams. Know that when you are looking for a job, if they don’t treat you with respect then it’s not worth your time. You are going to be working your butt off for a company and if they don’t show you that they value you from the get-go, they’re not going to value you when you work for them in the long run, either.

Whenever you find out about a job, do tons of research. You’ll find out more about the company and be better prepared for interviews as well. Also, if you happened to have an experience like the one I've written about here and would like to share it, please email me about it at jobhuntard@gmail.com. As always, good luck and keep on truckin'! Have patience!

-Paulz