Fake Job offers still try to defraud the unwary
08/05/2008
We are still getting contacted by individuals who have received "spam" job offers purporting to come from SOS Children. Many of these people are individuals who have posted their CVs onto employment sites (Reid, Monster etc) but some have just received spam "dressed" to look as though it is from us. Sometimes the spam lists our charity number, postal address and some names of people working for us (trustees for example) taken from our website. They almost always quote a "fly-by-night" email address at Yahoo, AOL or email instead of our proper office address (but the email address may be hidden(. Sometimes they mention other charities too.
Most of the time these emails are just a nuisance. They clog up our inbox and we waste time answering people who are checking to see if there come from us . The nasty side is that they are attempts to defraud the individual using the "Western Union" or "Moneygram" fraud. The individual is told they have a job and asked for their own bank details, they get a dummy payment and is asked to transfer it on less an enticing "commission". They so do and a couple of weeks later the dummy payment (which may have "cleared" weeks before) is found to be fraudulent and is reversed. A few times people have got this far and lost their money before they contact us and ask about it.
In general there is little we can do. We have mentioned the problem to the police a few times but they know all about it and as it is generic, although they are working on it they are not going to fix it for us first. We have tried chasing Yahoo and gmail to get email accounts closed down but they just re-emerge again. We contact employment sites when we discover "fake" job adverts posted claiming they are from us, but the adverts are often only up for a week and by the time we know about them they are gone. We are disappointed that these sites don't check more before allowing job offer posts. Generally the perpetrators are not in the UK, and often the targeted individuals are not in the UK either.
We are sorry for the disappointment of well meaning individuals who would like to help us and are misled. We are even more sorry when occasionally people lose money in our name.