A fake job offer gone wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#261

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #137

sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

Are cheques even used for anything except for fraud anymore? Open call: Anyone out there paying or receiving payment with cheque in the last ten years?

Cheques are a very useful and quite secure method of transaction (because all the security work and processing framework to prevent cheque fraud has been in place since the 1970s). They are slow. That's the point. They are essentially a two factor method of instruction to your bank. Legally (in Britain at least) one can use any reasonable method to give instructions to ones bank. Banks that want to "phase them out" b…

I don't think you realize how easy and secure things are in Europe.

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#262

Post by notahacker » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

archb wrote: post #70

Two of my friends got the same email upon applying: offer to interview, PDF interview, offered job position, asked to sign offer letter, and offer to send a check. It easily stood out as a scam, as I have read tons of similar stories on reddit. What stood out to me is that they had applied on Indeed via LinkedIn, yet gotten into this scam loop. As Indeed a reputable place, curious, I applied to the same position but…

Indeed sell access to candidate information uploaded to their platform (including contacts). Can't remember whether it's clearly communicated to candidates or opted out by default or not, but there's a use case for that service and I've helped make legitimate hires using it before.

But for the scammer it's easy enough to quietly use an Indeed business account completely unrelated to their scam, buy a bunch of resumes from people who have actually applied for jobs in a certain field on Indeed, and contact those candidates, pretending to be a different business that posted real job ad for that job on Indeed.

It also helps that Indeed users tend to one-click apply to large numbers of jobs so might believe they actually applied to that specific job, or otherwise trust some clever job-matching stuff is happening with their resume. Especially since most of the time it'll be their actual resume the "employer" responds with, not just their LinkedIn profile info

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#263

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

jestarray wrote: post #63

tasty_freeze wrote: post #55

Sadly, my daughter got scammed earlier this year. She is a recent college grad from a liberal arts school, and had been working six months doing retail work after graduation. Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise. She not only lost $3000 f…

I understand, I had that same belief. My thoughts were that faking checks and money is dangerous and stupidly hard, and since jobs pay you, the idea that it was a scam never came to my mind until way later when I was asked to wire...

I can go on Walmart.com (or many other places) and get a box of checks made for $15 with any name, routing number, and account number I care to provide them.

That said, receiving a personal check from a company of any size should properly set off a lot of alarm bells.

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#264

Post by grepfru_it » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

jacurtis wrote: post #241

tasty_freeze wrote: post #55

Sadly, my daughter got scammed earlier this year. She is a recent college grad from a liberal arts school, and had been working six months doing retail work after graduation. Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise. She not only lost $3000 f…

At least your daughter went through a full interview, which does add a layer of legitimacy. The most shocking element of OP's story is that he never actually got interviewed by a real person. He filled out a questionaire, received no feedback from it other than "You're hired at 12.5% more than you're asking". This to me is the biggest red flag of all leading up to the actual "ask" to cash the check and send funds. It…

why why why would you send money to someone who would ask you to send it back. why can't they just convert that money state themselves? i always wonder how people end up for these scams.

unless its your very close friend or family, don't launder money. i think this is a life lesson we learn in middle school and grow up to think adults are more trustworthy

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#265

Post by wpietri » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

zorrolovsky wrote: post #103

ryandrake wrote: post #48

Great job figuring out it was a scam but honestly, it’s crazy that these things still work on anyone all the way in 2022. You would think that by now every human being that walks the earth would know that whenever someone you don’t know sends you “money” and then requests you send it back (or to another party) in a different form, it’s always a scam. There should be some ceremony whenever someone turns 16 or somethin…

This post seem to blame victims for the problem, and that is not fair. People can be in dark places mentally, struggle with disease, family issues, etc. Not everybody is mentally sharp 100% of the time to identify a scam attack and fight it back. The problem is not victims, the problem is scammers. There should be better mechanisms to quickly clamp down on them. In this case, it would be really good if there was a me…

> Not everybody is mentally sharp 100% of the time to identify a scam attack and fight it back.

Exactly. A point made over and over in "The Field Guide to 'Human Error'" [1] is that when looking at failure, you can't use your current knowledge and state of mind when evaluating the circumstance. You have to look at it with the actual knowledge and state of mind at the time. If you don't, you will fail to find the actual problems and correct them.

Take this, for example:

> You would think that by now every human being that walks the earth would know

I would not think that! That's an unevidenced assumption. It's less a statement about the world than it is a declaration of ignorance. It makes it hard to engage curiously with the reality of the circumstances. Even if it were true, it assumes that having heard something once is the same thing as being able to apply it in all circumstances and all cognitive conditions. If people just stop there, we will never improve things.

Indeed, I think it's worth asking why victim-blaming is such a common reaction to stories of scams. One part is the just world fallacy [2]. Another is the fundamental attribution error [3]. And one that I have definitely been guilty of is that it lets me feel smart. "I, a genius, recognize the specific scam pattern. They, those helpless fools, never see it coming. Ergo, I have once again proved my mental superiority." It's hogwash, of course. But satisfying, comforting hogwash. It took me a long time to realize that it was incorrect and that pursuing feelings of smartness often made me effectively stupider.

[1] A book I strongly recommend to everybody in software: https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[3] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#266

Post by wpietri » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

alanfranz wrote: post #136

zorrolovsky wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post seem to blame victims for the problem, and that is not fair. People can be in dark places mentally, struggle with disease, family issues, etc. Not everybody is mentally sharp 100% of the time to identify a scam attack and fight it back. The problem is not victims, the problem is scammers. There should be better mechanisms to quickly clamp down on them. In this case, it would be really good if there was a me…

^ this. I was scammed about EUR 1500 some 7 years ago. It didn’t seem a scam: the price for an item was low but not too low, the identity of the seller I could verify. But the item ultimately didn’t arrive, and I didn’t know that for italian law it’s considered an “unfulfilled contract” rather than fraud, and requires a civil rather than a criminal case, which would turn out far too costly. But the point is: I didn’t…

As an aside, this is one of the users I think everybody should design for:

> I just had my first kid and I was stressed

I often think back to when my nephew was tiny and imagine my brother trying to work a particular interface with one hand while holding a crying baby in the other.

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#267

Post by jacurtis » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:31 PM UTC

aabajian wrote: post #195

For everyone who is commenting on the grammar/spelling mistakes, this is on-purpose. It dramatically increases the positive predictive value of their scam (i.e. the probability that the victim they have messaged on day 1 will go through with the wire transfer on day 5). It does this by pre-filtering the general population for gullible individuals.

Yes, because it is worth noting that there is a tangible investment being made by the scammer here. They have to know that there's a decent chance that the victim follows-through on the scam.

At a minimum there is the cost of the fake check itself (which looks pretty good to be honest) and the cost of the overnight UPS envelope. At a minimum I'd imagine this is a $25 investment on the scammer. If the victim gets cold feet (like OP) and doesn't go through with it, then the scammer actually does lose money here. They are making a real tangible gamble when they send the check that the victim will fall for it. I realize $25 isn't a lot, but they wouldn't want to just send this out to everyone. So there needs to be some level of filtering to give the scammer the confidence that the victim will follow-through.

The bad grammar is intentional. This is often cited as a way to think that the victim is "stupid", but thats actually not true. The scammer is assuming that the victim will know the grammar is bad and actually notice the mistakes. The scammer isn't looking for someone who doesn't notice the bad grammar, they are looking for someone who is willing to overlook the red flag that the bad grammar represents. If they are willing to overlook a major red flag like that, then they are more likely to overlook smaller red flags later on, making them more likely to follow through. OP is a great example of this as they state at the beginning that they noticed the bad grammar from the start, but were excited about the opportunity and overlooked it. Even someone with only high school education would read this and naturally notice the bad grammar. But overlooking it is what the scammers want to see.

I also think it's important the line where the scammer asks OP if he has ever done a wire transfer before. When OP says they haven't then the response from the scammer was "Ok do it NOW". Again, they want people who don't understand the un-reversible nature of wire transfers. A lot of people naturally assume that all banking transactions are protected like credit cards (and to a lesser degree debit cards) are. Someone who has never made a wire transfer is likely to not understand this, which is great news for the scammer. A natural response from a co-worker if they asked you legitimately (for some reason) to make a wire transfer and you say you didn't know how, would be to offer to explain how it works, not rush them to do something that they just admitted they know nothing about.

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#268

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

jacurtis wrote: post #241

tasty_freeze wrote: post #55

Sadly, my daughter got scammed earlier this year. She is a recent college grad from a liberal arts school, and had been working six months doing retail work after graduation. Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise. She not only lost $3000 f…

At least your daughter went through a full interview, which does add a layer of legitimacy. The most shocking element of OP's story is that he never actually got interviewed by a real person. He filled out a questionaire, received no feedback from it other than "You're hired at 12.5% more than you're asking". This to me is the biggest red flag of all leading up to the actual "ask" to cash the check and send funds. It…

>It seems odd to get a job for $90k /yr without ever meeting someone from the company.

Odd but not unheard of. I got a job offer from Boeing sight unseen based on a cover letter and resume. When I asked, they did give me a site visit (though I didn't ultimately take the offer).

I know it may seem odd in a world of leetcode interviews etc. but, if you're hiring a bunch of new grad engineers for one of the aerospace boom cycles, you can save a lot of effort by just hiring a bunch of people out of schools that pass some filter.

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#269

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #226

maccard wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at corporate jobs and smaller companies, and frankly if a large company said "here's a list of our authorised resellers, and a signing bonus paid by cheque, please use it to buy equipment as it's faster than going through procurement" I would 100% believe them as at every job I've ever had (before I got a company card) it was faster and easier to just buy and expense. I genuinely wouldn't bat an eyelid un…

I would certainly expect it to be faster than procurement, but not living in the US the concept of receiving a Cheque in the 21st century would raise all forms of red flags. If they deposited the cash directly into my account via a BACS payment, same as my salary, that would be far more believable. That said, $10k in office expenses for someone starting on $40k a year ($20/hr training) would also raise a flag. Edit:…

A personal check in this case I guess would be... odd. And there are certainly other red flags. But I receive checks from various organizations I don't have direct deposit set up with on a semi-regular basis, e.g. from my healthcare flexible spending account. Checks are definitely still used in the US even if much less frequently than they used to be. (If you count the ones my bank sends out on my behalf I write a few checks a month myself.)

Re: A fake job offer gone wrong

#270

Post by abrylov » Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #226

maccard wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at corporate jobs and smaller companies, and frankly if a large company said "here's a list of our authorised resellers, and a signing bonus paid by cheque, please use it to buy equipment as it's faster than going through procurement" I would 100% believe them as at every job I've ever had (before I got a company card) it was faster and easier to just buy and expense. I genuinely wouldn't bat an eyelid un…

I would certainly expect it to be faster than procurement, but not living in the US the concept of receiving a Cheque in the 21st century would raise all forms of red flags. If they deposited the cash directly into my account via a BACS payment, same as my salary, that would be far more believable. That said, $10k in office expenses for someone starting on $40k a year ($20/hr training) would also raise a flag. Edit:…

We do. Small companies don’t want to deal with setting direct deposits through an ACH and it’s much easier to write a check. The latest number from the Federal Reserve was that in 2018 they processed 18 billion checks issued by companies and individuals.