Recent Grads Beware of Your Next Employment

Just when you thought it couldn’t happen to you, you fall victim to getting scammed!

Fresh out of college and being a recent graduate can be extremely stressful in finding legitimate work. So stressful that is common these days for young adults, mainly, to fall victim of an ’employment’ scam. And although the signs can be obvious at times the will to not be another unemployed graduate can be blinding.

But what are these employment scams?

One of these scams which prey on people looking for work will offer you the job title of shipping and receiving clerk (or something similar) and accounts receivable while working from home. Now, these days scammers have smarten-up and would tell you that you will be temporarily working from home because they are opening or expanding their business to a location near you. Unless you’re a virtual freelance writer be wary of work-at-home jobs, period. These companies will most likely be an international company with names similar to ‘SRG International Private Limited‘ and ‘Vision One Research‘.

The accounts receivable will suggest that you will need office equipment which the company will pay for themselves. Doesn’t sound too bad right? They will send you a check for the office equipment. This is the ultimate sign of a potential scam! No company will send someone money in the mail to whom they have never met. If you have already received this check throw it away immediately. Because soon they will ask you to put the money into your account. This is a sign of a fake check fraud. How do they benefit? They leave you in debt after having transfer the money into the companies account so that the office equipment can be shipped.

With the shipping and receivable job scams,  these companies will send expensive merchandise to your house (using credit card scams) and asking you to ship it to another. Again no legit job or company will send anything (expensive items)to someone they have not meet. And they will send things in large lump sums. This is bad on your end, because these companies where the merchandise are coming from will notify authorities that your address is receiving stolen merchandise (which you are in deed).  If you are receiving merchandise and want to check that the work is legit, you can always call the merchandise companies yourself and give them the transaction number and they will tell you whether or not the payment was rejected or never received (this is what I did).

These employment scams people will only communicate via email or yahoo messaging. Basically  using any form of communicating that does not involve speaking to the actual employer.

If employers can do background checks on potential employees (you) utilize the web and your resources to do a thorough background check on them. I learned the hard way when I graduated.

Now you may think how can one fall for such, but it does happen because young adults want work as soon as possible after they graduate and aren’t patient or may be going through financial troubles that they get blinded by the idea of having a job and having income that they ignore the red flags.

Always do a background check on the company you may be working for before you say ‘yes’.