Employment scams aren’t new, but the fact they do happen and take advantage of vulnerable people is heartless, says Peter Moorhouse, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau (serving the Atlantic Provinces) in Halifax.
“I honestly don’t know how people who do this can sleep at night knowing that their causing distress and real financial pain to real people,” said Moorhouse, who has been with the bureau for the past five years.
Moorhouse has reports of job scams conning people out of amounts up to $8,000, but the norm is $1,500 to $2,000 so scammers can “fly under the radar.”
He adds that if someone is unemployed, getting scammed out of $1,500 or $2,000 "can mean the difference between getting groceries or not, or paying rent or not,” he said.
The Better Business Bureau is currently tracking 13,668 reports of employment scams across North America, including 946 in Canada and more than 150 in Atlantic Canada. Employment scams usually involve a job seeker posting a resume on an online job site. The job seeker is then contacted by someone impersonating a legitimate company. The person is hired, sent a cheque to deposit, and asked to purchase items. The scammers request that the balance be wired to a third-party. A few days later, the cheque bounces. The scam also usually involves identity theft in cases that you provide personal information, such as your banking information, date of birth, and social insurance number.
Moorhouse spoke to The Guardian this week for a Q&A to talk about employment scams.
Q: Why do employment scams work?
PM: It's partly because you're hitting people win their most vulnerable, most in need. The other thing, unfortunately, is that many of them are really sophisticated. It takes a really keen eye to spot it as a scam. In many cases it sounds too good to be true – a really generous salary, work from home, flexibility, a title that sounds good. So it's all of these things that tap into somebody's feelings of self-worth from a professional perspective. The common denominator is there is never an in-person interview. Generally, there's sometimes a little bit of back-and-forth conversation in an email or even Google chats. And that would be one of the first warning signs – is if a company is going to an offer on the table without ever meeting face-to-face, your alarm bells should be going off. There is something really off about that. I don't know of a single company that wouldn't have a face-to-face interview.
Q: Is there a demographic that is more likely to fall victim to this scam?
PM: It's right across the spectrum. So, if somebody is of an age where they are a working individual in the job market, there's no distinction between somebody in their 20s or somebody in their 50s – it's all of the demographics, but young people, and in particular new Canadians. Let's say an international student comes to study at UPEI and has just graduated. They don't know necessarily the job market in Canada. They don't necessarily know what the norms are, what's usual (such as not having an in person interview). The other common thread is if you're in your 20s and your entire life is online, maybe it seems normal that a job interview would happen by email exchange or online chat. If you haven't had a parent or guardian or older, wiser adult help you understand that this isn't the norm, it becomes really easy to fall for this.
"There are people who would be quite ashamed that they've fallen for something like this, and they just don't want to tell anybody. They would rather just suck it up that they've lost $1,500 or $2,000 rather than having to tell their family that they've made this incredibly awful mistake."
Question: We often hear that reported incidents of scams, including this one, are lower than the actual incidents. Why is that?
PM: Because they're under reported we don't know the full extent of the problem. But it is absolutely correct that pretty much right across the board, scams do go underreported. There's a couple of different reasons. In some cases, it's just because people don't know what to do, and don’t know that there are agencies out there (to contact), including (the business bureau) and The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre – if you've lost money, certainly the police. In more cases, it's a little bit because they're embarrassed. There are people who would be quite ashamed that they've fallen for something like this, and they just don't want to tell anybody. They would rather just suck it up that they've lost $1,500 or $2,000 rather than having to tell their family that they've made this incredibly awful mistake.
Question: What can people do to protect themselves from this scam?
PM: The message is super simple. If you're approached by a “company” online you haven't applied to, that's warning number one. And whoever made first contact, if you're going through an interview, or sort of an interview process and are presented with a job offer without ever having (spoken to) somebody face-to-face, no matter what the cover story was to explain that, that is red flag number two. And then red flag number three is if you've missed the first two red flags and you're "employed" by a company who send you a cheque and wants you to deposit it and wire the balance to a third-party, the alarm bells should be screaming at that point. And please don't deposit the cheque and lose the money because once it's gone, it's gone.
