Scammers targeting job seekers looking to work from home

A word of warning for job seekers. Scammers are targeting people looking to work from home by offering them large amounts of money for jobs that turn out to be bogus. KESQ and CBS Local 2’s Joe Galli interviewed a Palm Desert man named Mario. We are holding back on using his full identity because alleged scam artists have a lot of his personal information. Mario has been going online to find a job where he can work from home. He says he used the website FlexJobs and found a listing for a customer service job. “The posting said $35 an hour for training and $45 an hour after,” said Mario. “Who doesn’t want to make $45 an hour.” After applying, Mario started to see some red flags. The company would only do the interview via text message on Google Hangout. Mario said the questions and answers seemed very robotic. After telling Mario he got the job the company sent him a check for almost $7,000 to supposedly pay for supplies. When Mario tried to cash the check at the bank, the teller told him it was bogus. HOW TO AVOID SCAMMERS TARGETING JOB SEEKERS “I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I said this is the first check I got from my future employer. I got super defensive because I didn’t want to get in trouble,” Mario said. The Better Business Bureau warns the vast majority of postings for work from home jobs are scammers looking to take personal information or get job seekers to cash fraudulent checks and make purchases from the company. The bank catches the fraud later, leaving the job seeker on the hook for the money. According to the Sara Sutton Fell the CEO of FlexJobs, scammers will sometimes build fake websites that mimic FlexJobs to trick people into applying for scams. “Unfortunately scammers are really savvy in taking advantage of people who are actively looking for jobs and for people who might just be passively looking for opportunities to make extra money,” Sutton Fell said. Sutton Fell said her website does vet the companies that post job listings especially when people report suspicious activity. Editorial note: A company mentioned in the piece, FlexJobs, was one of several job services that the job seeker, Mario, had been using, however FlexJobs is not implicated as the source of the scam job. FlexJobs goes to extensive lengths to screen job postings and companies in their database and to protect job seekers from scam’s such as this one.