Is This Company A SCAM? How To Recognise And Where To Check It

By darcvanilla Tuesday January 12, 2010

In today’s short article I would like to worn you about scam companies who look for naive, inexperienced and young people to hire and use them.
Fist of all, you should know what a typical scam is. Scam, often called also swindle or confidence trick is an attempt to defraud person by gaining her/his confidence. There are many types of scams; e-mail scam, investment scam, website scam, company scam etc.
This can happen to you too, for example when you look for a job in marketing; e.g. advertising agency.

How To Recognise It

If you have no or little experience in the field you apply for jobs, the chances that some head hunter will invite you for interview are.. small. Therefore, if you suddenly receive an e-mail from the unknown company (which often has words in the name like “Worldwide, International Ltd) you shouldn’t jump from happiness right away. Control if you are not just experiencing an attempt of scam company.

Recent e-mail which I’ve got from the scam company looked like this:

EA Worldwide Ltd.

Dear Kamila,

Thank you again for your interest in us! I attempted to contact you via both email and phone regarding the CV you submitted.

We are looking to fill our openings immediately due to our recent expansion and the signing of new clients. Please contact our HR Department onour mainline as 0207 2343 5560 soon as possible, as we are closing interviews by the end of this week. For the latest news:http://pressroom.prlog.org/EAWorldwide/

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind Regards,

[and here address and some fake name]

First and the most important: I haven’t submitted any CV to this company, but I’m aware that some people who look for job may send hundreds CV applications a week and it may become confusing which company you have applied for.

Where To Check It

The easiest way to check if your doggy company is a scam is to look for any given details like office phone number or address. Remember that actual company can be registered on the given address, but it still doesn’t mean that it plays fair.

By typing the phone number into the search engine or on the website Whocallsme.com you can find if any other people noticed something suspicious.
Type into Youtube.com name of your company and see if there is anything reliable on it. My adventure with ‘Red Square Marketing Company London’ finished as soon as I found hidden-camera movie on YT where the ‘teamleader’ …welll.. was far from being professional.

Warn Others

If you experienced scam company, a very wise idea is to warn others. There are many websites you can report a scam. Scam.dom or english website Consumer Direct are the examples where you can post an information about suspicious company.

Important Tips

When you get an invitation to interview in the company, make sure to make your homework and check:

if the company actually exists – are the address and telephone number provided?
if there what reputation does it have – if it’s new company, became suspicious and look for any proof of actual trading
what products does it sell.
your potential job vacancy description – is it clearly specified or it speaks general about the field company advertises itself?
check the website – see if there are any contact numbers and if yes, make a call to ask about your job details

When you done that you can start preparing for your interview. You may want to read the article about How To Get Your First Graphic Design Job.
Good luck with finding your dream, but real job And you? Do you have any experience with scam companies? What made you suspicious about that company?