Backpage.com Makes Job Hunting Easy, But Scammers Are Lurking

Phoenix, AZ, May 18, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Some unethical people see the economic downturn as an opportunity to capitalize on others’ hardships. The folks at Backpage.com, the internet’s premier site for easy, streamlined job searching and posting, wants its users to be aware of the tactics that these virtual vultures are using to cheat people out of their money.

According to Carl Ferrer of Backpage.com, “Employment traffic by users is up 30% since October of 2008, and we have seen job scam postings also significantly increase.” Backpage.com employs 20 or so people to discard most of the scams out of the 2 million postings it gets each month. Ferrer also cites the honest Backpage.com users who take the time to report questionable postings as a second line of defense against scammers. Despite the best efforts of staff and users, however, some of the bad apples make it through to the site, and people need to know what to look for in order to avoid being swindled.

The two primary job scams involve fraudulent check cashing and identity theft:

1- The check cashing job scam seems attractive to people because of its simplicity and promise of easy work. The typical ‘employer’ in this case is a foreign company or a domestic company that conducts business overseas. They offer a percentage of money from checks that they ask the user to cash, sometimes citing international banking laws as making the process difficult for them to accomplish. The bogus checks are sent to the person who signed up, who then cashes them, keeps the agreed upon percentage, and wires the remaining funds to an overseas location. Since the checks are bad, once they bounce, the person who cashed them will bear financial responsibility, and the scammer will get away free and clear, holding a bunch of free new money.

2- The identity theft scam is difficult to recognize because often the ‘employer’ makes a posting that resembles or actually carbon copies legitimate job postings. In the process of applying, and then being accepted for the position, the job-seeker is asked for sensitive personal information like social security, bank account, and/or credit card numbers. “Never give your bank information or social security number without verifying the employer as a legitimate company,” says Ferrer. Further, there are few legitimate companies that would require you to release this kind of information online, so the best practice would be to simply refrain from entering this information virtually at all.

These are just a couple of examples of the many different kinds of scams out there. Backpage.com job seekers simply need to do their due diligence and research regarding the postings they answer so that they won’t be victimized by this despicable practice.

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