Dallas, TX, United States, 10/30/2021 / Top Wire News /
A new scam is fast spreading online. It targets job seekers, especially those in careers like virtual assistants and online marketing professionals. The end result is a disappointed job seeker, the employer blamed for the promises that it never made in the first place, and the scammer in possession of valuable access to cloud accounts from which they can launch DDOS attacks and other scams.
The scammers first steal an unwitting business’s name and reputation. These are used to entice job seekers to set up commercial cloud accounts as a condition for a lucrative employment offer. Once the job seeker has set up the cloud accounts, the scammer takes over the account, and with their objective now achieved, drops out of sight of job seekers.
The job seeker is left heartbroken and after being unable to contact anyone about the “offer” thinks the real employer whose identity was stolen and used by scammers has ghosted him or her. Some job seekers also threaten the employer with retaliation on social media for breaking its promise. To alleviate this risk of damaged reputation, would-be employers should thoughtfully update the careers pages of their website and alert job seekers about this scam.
The employers must warn the job seekers that the company is not affiliated with such scams and remind the prospective job seekers that the company would never ask applicants to set up commercial cloud accounts as a precondition for employment.
The scam usually starts with a scammer contacting a job seeker through a false recruiter profile, for example, via LinkedIn about a full-time position with a legitimate US-based company. Freelance virtual assistants and digital marketing professionals are usually the most common targets of scammers. Victims are almost always located outside the US. The false recruiters often tell the victim that they are recruiting for the company, they also provide a legitimate description of the company on whose behalf they are supposed to work and also provide a link to the company’s legitimate website.
This sets this new scam apart from other older ones where scammers mostly used links to a fake company website. The use of the original website of the company provides legitimacy and makes the victim feel that everything is normal. The scammer also often invites the victim to engage in further discussion about the supposed job on communications platforms such as Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or WhatsApp. The victim may even be asked to join a chat group with false accounts posing as C-suite executives of the company. These false executives often use the names and photos of real executives in their profiles.
After a brief discussion, the victim is offered a job, and the scammer may also send a W-8 and a multi-page document that the scammers call an “NDA”. Most of the documents appear to be sourced from real non-disclosure agreements and contain fairly common legal terms.
Source:
New Online Scam Uses False Promises To Trick Job Seekers Into Giving Scammers Illicit Cloud Access.
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2021/10/07/new-online-scam-uses-false-promises-to-trick-job-seekers-into-giving-scammers-illicit-cloud-access/
Source: Story.KISSPR.com
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