Today I received the following email:
Dear Cheryl,
I recently saw your resume online and would like you to apply for an Administrative Assistant position with our company. We are World-Voice-News, the fastest growing news site on the web right now.
Cheryl, if you are looking for a real opportunity and a real long-term career with an exciting cutting edge company, you may be the person we are looking for, so apply today!
The power of the Internet is allowing World-Voice-News to launch a worldwide news network, focusing on news reported by local reporters in over 1,000 cities worldwide.
Administrative Assistants perform daily tasks involving the organization of reporter’s stories, general correspondence and other duties as needed.
We offer the following:* Highly competitive salary
* Full Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits.
* Flexibility – you can work your own hours, just as long as you put in at least 40 hours each week.
* Opportunity for rapid advancement.
* Tuition Reimbursements.
The person we are looking for is reliable, consistent, hard working, and has a genuine regard for our readers.
Cheryl, if you feel the Administrative Assistant position is right for you, visit the link below and fill out the online application. (If the link does not work in your e-mail, you may copy and paste the address in your browser.)
http://www.worldvoicesite.com/careers.aspx?A=6225498
Once I receive your online application, I will contact you within one to two business days.
Regards,
Lauren Piccoli
World-Voice-News
I usually delete anything that sounds remotely spam-like, but often monster.com and career builder.com do send me real emails based on my resume. Although I wasn’t interested, I figured I would check out the World Voice News website. After typing in “world voice news” into Google, however, a slew of results containing the words scam and fraud appeared on the screen.
It turns out that World Voice News (formally USA Voice) does not exist; it is instead a phishing scam that takes and sells your information from their “job application”. Read this article for a detailed explanation about phishing.
One victim of this scam even went so far as to write 114 articles for the alleged internet news provider. His emails and calls to ‘management’ regarding payment went unanswered. He began receiving emails from people alerting him that World Voice News was a fraud. To this day he never received payment, but did learn that the address World Voice News was using actually belongs to Newt Gingrich (who has never heard of it or the former USA Voice). Read his full story here.
As of today, many complaints have been filed with different bureaus, including the Internet Crime Complaint Center and the Better Business Bureau. The Washington Post has also written an expose that you can read here. Job search engines such as monster.com and careerbuilder.com have acknowledged that scams exist on their sites (although they are taken down immediately upon discovery) and say that they include warnings against fraud for such reasons.
About 109 million people fell victim to phishing scams in 2006. (Source) Please do your research before giving out any personal information!
Posted by cher on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 4:41 pm.