From Snopes Dot Com
Origins: Employment frauds typically prey upon the gullible or the desperate whose burning desire to secure lucrative work blinds them to the scams about to be run on them. Generally, the promise of easy-to-perform labor that pays very well is held out to those disadvantaged in their search for employment by their lack of relevant job experience or education and so appears to be the answer to their prayers. Because the need to believe in such fairytale careers runs so strong,
ordinary skepticism is temporarily set aside by those bedazzled by such false promises, and that little nagging "You know better than to be taken in by this" voice is silenced, thereby leaving job seekers vulnerable to being fleeced.
A common form of the employment swindle is that of the fraudulent secret shopper job posting. Such ads tout the ease of the work, the short hours, and the money to be made from merely visiting stores each day to make purchases, even as they stress that no special training or educational background is required of prospective hires. According to such come-ons, successful applicants will be working on behalf of a variety of retailers and manufacturers of consumer products who are interested in knowing more about how products are displayed and marketed in stores and how customers are treated in such establishments. Those hired by such agencies will spend their days effecting specific purchases at specific retailers, afterwards turning in reports about their experiences and collecting fat paychecks for their troubles.
There are bona fide "secret shopper" jobs to be had, which makes telling sheep from goats regarding which of such job postings are real and which are but the opening gambits of frauds not always a straightforward and simple matter. The real and the fraudulent can be well mixed together at times, with both sorts advertised on the Internet and in newspapers. There is therefore no protection to be had from the presumption that an ad which actually appeared on the pages of a newspaper leads to a real job rather than to a vacuuming of one's pockets, nor is there certainty in the assumption that that which is advertised in cyberspace is necessarily a con.
More from Snopes Dot Com article
scam, spam, Identity Theft, Phishing
Origins: Employment frauds typically prey upon the gullible or the desperate whose burning desire to secure lucrative work blinds them to the scams about to be run on them. Generally, the promise of easy-to-perform labor that pays very well is held out to those disadvantaged in their search for employment by their lack of relevant job experience or education and so appears to be the answer to their prayers. Because the need to believe in such fairytale careers runs so strong,
ordinary skepticism is temporarily set aside by those bedazzled by such false promises, and that little nagging "You know better than to be taken in by this" voice is silenced, thereby leaving job seekers vulnerable to being fleeced.
A common form of the employment swindle is that of the fraudulent secret shopper job posting. Such ads tout the ease of the work, the short hours, and the money to be made from merely visiting stores each day to make purchases, even as they stress that no special training or educational background is required of prospective hires. According to such come-ons, successful applicants will be working on behalf of a variety of retailers and manufacturers of consumer products who are interested in knowing more about how products are displayed and marketed in stores and how customers are treated in such establishments. Those hired by such agencies will spend their days effecting specific purchases at specific retailers, afterwards turning in reports about their experiences and collecting fat paychecks for their troubles.
There are bona fide "secret shopper" jobs to be had, which makes telling sheep from goats regarding which of such job postings are real and which are but the opening gambits of frauds not always a straightforward and simple matter. The real and the fraudulent can be well mixed together at times, with both sorts advertised on the Internet and in newspapers. There is therefore no protection to be had from the presumption that an ad which actually appeared on the pages of a newspaper leads to a real job rather than to a vacuuming of one's pockets, nor is there certainty in the assumption that that which is advertised in cyberspace is necessarily a con.
More from Snopes Dot Com article
scam, spam, Identity Theft, Phishing
