Scammers are on the rise with more and more fictitious job offers appearing on job boards. More job seekers are being conned into traps to part with some amount of money or are becoming victims of identity theft. However, there are certain trends which can help user identify an email if it is fake job offer or a genuine one.
How to identify a fake job offer?
- Too good to be true: The mail will be boisterous and congratulate on the subject line itself. The pay will be usually great and you get the job right away. In the whole process, you didn’t contact them (no application yet) but they contacted you.
- Unprofessional email: The domain names from which the email comes tend to be questionable. Suppose you receive an email from XYZ Inc. Now the email should have the domain- @xyz.com or @xyz.in etc. Always remember a reputed company will never use email service of Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo to send job offers. There will be multiple grammatical errors if you notice them.
- Always research the company on google. There will always be a website and detailed activities of the company on the internet if it’s a genuine company.
- The contact information in e-mail will be shady. Try to find that is the same information available on company’s website or not.
- You might be asked to give away some confidential information or deposit a basic interview fee. Always remember companies don’t ask for fee for interviewing. If there is this demand, the email is definitely a fake job offer.
- The job offer letter is an attached file (.doc/.docx/.pdf/.png/.jpg). It is usually bright and colorful. Reputed companies use black and white formats for such job descriptions. Also, for a genuine email there should never be an image file.
- The job description will be usually vague and sketchy. It will only confuse you more. The role might not even ask for specific skills. This clearly means you are going to be scammed.
- Once you identify a fake job offer, do not fall into replying the email. This give the hackers an idea that your email is genuine. Which might create problems for you in future. Simply mark it as spam and delete it.
Email scanner and firewalls can prevent from lot of such mail but still victims fall prey to scammers. Logix Infosecurity provides many cyber security tools to counter such challenges.
