Job scams on Craigslist
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When I lived in Austin, Texas, I used the Craigslist website to find two well-paying jobs. Well, not really well-paying jobs, but jobs that paid more than 10 dollars an hour. When I moved to Shreveport I decided that Craigslist would be a good place to find a job since it had worked so well in the past. There weren’t as many jobs listed for the Shreveport/Bossier area, but I figured this was because it was a smaller city and perhaps not all of the businesses had jumped on the technology bandwagon yet.
After spending a couple of hours writing cover letters and crafting resumés for the jobs I was able to find, I congratulated myself and sat back and waited until Monday for the calls to start pouring in. To my surprise, I didn’t get any calls; what I got was an influx of emails from the companies I had applied to. Those emails requested that I go to third party websites with names like greatcareersearch.com and perfectfitcareers.com. The sites all looked suspiciously alike and they were very basic designs. I decided to check the site names in Google and came to find that they were all scams. They were set up for people to fill out their application data and then were told to fill out other forms for third party services and offers. Needless to say I did not mess with them, but I was still annoyed that I had wasted good time on those cover letters for jobs that did not exist.
Still, I thought, it wasn’t all the jobs I applied for - some of them were sure to be real. A little while later I got some more emails; one was a response from a company I had sent in a cover letter and resumé to requesting that I fill out a short intelligence test to make sure I was a good fit for their company. The link in the email took me to a site where I could fill out an IQ test for the chance to win a Blackberry… another scam. By the end of the day, fully half of the jobs I had spent time applying for turned out to be fake. So if you’ve responded to a Craigslist ad and found yourself being redirected to a third party application site, it is probably best not to waste your time with those. It’s a shame for them to do this at a time with such high unemployment and with so many people desperately looking for work, but I suppose you can’t expect too much from people like that.
11 Comments
Randy Nichols
August 3rd, 2009
at 7:00pm
Where did you get your blog layout from? I’d like to get one like it for my blog.
Job scams on Craigslist - Craigslist Blog
August 4th, 2009
at 2:00am
[...] This article is featured on the custom Craigslist Blog at Auto-Blogs.us. [...]
Buffet
August 4th, 2009
at 2:26am
I hope you reported them.
Job scams on Craigslist - Jobs Blog
August 4th, 2009
at 4:10am
[...] This article is featured on the custom Jobs Blog at Auto-Blogs.us. [...]
zenium
August 4th, 2009
at 10:05am
Just shows the way out of unemployment is to setup a scam.
I actually find most internet advertisement to be some form a scam. Examples: lose 5 inches from your waist, make $5K per month working part time from home.
Come on the only people making the money are the scam artist, not the person responding to those fake and canned ads.
Job Scams On Craigslist « JOOBIT
August 4th, 2009
at 10:32am
[...] Read Complete Article [...]
Ventego
August 5th, 2009
at 3:54am
Very interesting and amusing subject. I read with great pleasure.
Rebecca
August 20th, 2009
at 8:24am
Misery loves company. I thought it was just me. I live in Los Angeles. I’ve been applying to jobs alot lately. I never get any response from any company that I’ve actually applied to instead I am getting slammed with spam. One company Virtual Vocations is a complete scam. They have an ongoing ad on craigslist and I am pretty sure there are no “work at home” jobs with Virtual Vocations. Seems all they want is to steal your contact info to sell to a 3rd party offering me a “free laptop” or whatever. Good luck in your job search.
Ms L
September 21st, 2009
at 6:21am
I too have experienced numerous experiences just like those you explained and have no intention of using Craigslist anymore for job searches. It takes hours of my time and energy to complete cover letters and send off my resume only to have these scam marketing organizations reply back to me with their crap! Sad that those of us that have been hit the hardest continue to be hit!
yz
October 15th, 2009
at 9:08am
This has been happening to me too, i am constantly on craigsilst sending out resume, I must have sent out 100 in the last week, but no response, I know my job experience is really good and someone would have jumped on it by now, BUT nothing, exxcept some 3rd party applications about careers etc.. Also, My mom is a housekeeper so ive been trying to find her a job so i got 2 emails from 2 different people saying 2similiar things, one was in germany one was in texas and they were gonna have their “financier” mail her a cashiers check as a deposit (yeah ok) and they were gonna leave the key with the doorman, (yet no adress given), they wanted her info to mail the check, i closed my email and never replied…please be careful everyone, I cant believe people have nothing else to do but take advantage of the little people..shame shame….
PSE
November 20th, 2009
at 8:35am
Seriously, this is happening everywhere. Chicago and NW Indiana Craigslist has many jobs listed. I applied for only 2 that sounded legit. They were for Accounting/Office Admin jobs with construction companies both in New Lenox, IL. Both ads sounded as if they were posted by reputable employers seeking help in their offices. I sent my resume to both ads. Within hours the scam emails flooded my inbox. Everyone of them thanking me for applying to their job posting and their regret that due to the high volume of responses, or virus activity their servers were unable to open my resume attachment. I was redirected to their ‘website’ to either complete an application, take an IQ test, or complete a questionaire. Although I am grateful for my intelligence not to bother going to their websites as they are scams, it really pushes my buttons that these people are flooding our job banks and online job search venues. And Yes, I have even ran into these on sites like Careerbuilder and Indiana Career Connect (the states employment job site). As someone who has been laid off and out of work for almost a year now, and finding it almost impossible to find a job that pays enough to cover my housing costs let alone car, food, gas, etc….I’m wondering why something is not done to stop this!! Too many people are desperate to find employment, struggling just to stay in their homes and feed their families and it’s far too easy for many to fall victim to these scams in hopes of landing a very much needed job!! I’m appalled that people of this low caliber walk amongst us, but they do!