Fake Jobs
Part 1 - The Hook
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Fake jobs scams start with a text or a WhatsApp or Telegram message that goes:
What is glassdoor.com doing there ? Glassdoor.com is a legitimate site where people post reviews of companies where they work or have been interviewed. Are they aware of it ? I shall write to Glassdoor and find out.
Meantime, within a few minutes you get a message from someone who purports to be an attractive woman called Zoe:
And the pitch starts. Already the pay on offer is lower than the original come hither. I also note that they offer payment in USDT , not good old greenbacks, bucks, dollars. USDT is a crypto-currency notionally held at $1 , that is 1 USDT = $1. So what’s the difference ? Read on.
Who is SEOeStore ? These rabbit holes form a veritable warren of paths to explore - which I will in due course. What do we understand from this ? It seems that SEOeStore hosts apps. Is that how apps are distributed ? Really ? but never mind, lets stick to the task at hand - the job !
At first sight, its about 45 mins of work per day. If you work 7 days that works out at 114 dollars per day. Now that’s about half the 250/300 quoted earlier and a lot less than the ‘come hither’ rate of 600.
But perhaps the commission makes up the difference. I start seeing red flags already.
There’s a tiny doubt creeping in about this 7 day cycle stuff - your daily rate drops if you don’t work the full consecutive 7 days. Don’t you get a day off ? Also a month is 4.34 7 day periods so it seems that the monthly base salary ought to be 3472 not 6000 as quoted. I really should query this. But lets act all enthused and move forward.
Note that the commission is only 50-70 USDT per day which together with a base salary of 114 comes to 184 at most. We are really quite a way lower than the come hither amount of 250-300 per day.
So I skipped a meeting, did not send apologies and responded over a day later with the excuse that I ‘met a friend’ ? Would you hire such a flake ? I would dump this candidate in a heartbeat. But not the scammers.
And now the candidate is off to the gym ! Would you hire someone who is a gym rat and more interested in that and is half an hour late to boot for the training session ? These scammers will though.
So what is this seonstore.com. I seem to recall that the company was called seoEstore. O stop quibbling, what’s a n or a e in a business relationship ? Quite a lot in my book. Lets look up this url then. scam-detector.com gives it a 14.5% trust score, which is pretty low. Their review states:
The Scam Detector website Validator gives seonstore.com a pretty low trust score on the platform: 14.5. It signals that the business could be defined by the following tags: Controversial. High-Risk. Unsafe.. We are confident about our score as we also partner with other high-tech, fraud-prevention companies that found the same issues. So, why this low score? We came up with the 14.5 score based on 53 aggregated factors relevant to seonstore.com's industry. The algorithm flagged its seemingly suspicious success, even with a newly registered domain. It also detected high-risk activity related to phishing, spamming, and other factors noted in the Controversial. High-Risk. Unsafe. tags above. Long story short, we recommend staying away from this website…
You can look at the full report at scam-detector.com. Meantime back at the ranch:
So during training I get a 15% commission. Pretty sweet. 15% of what though ? Read on:
What is all this gobbledegook ? Somehow mysteriously you have a wallet that in a training session has 2484 USDT , a hefty sum. Is it mine ? Of course not. So what is it really ? One thing to note is this commission biz. During training its 15% but when actually working its 0.7% ! That’s right, not 7% but 0.7% .That’s pretty miserly surely.
(To be continued…)