Gumtree Job Advert Scam

Internet Scams have now become a common phenomenon. They are just about everywhere. A very striking example would be that of Gumtree. Whether it is properties, dating, competition adverts, vehicles or vacancies, Gumtree, as per common man’s knowledge is a post-free advertising site! And so the recruitment consultant at Oratory UK was quite surprised when he came across an email recently asking for bank details for job posting, which sounded weird as Gumtree was a free ad posting site.

A follow-up on this along with some careful investigation brought to light the fact that there were other scams as well “Fantastic job offer in a wonderful new hotel, just send money over so we can send your flight tickets, you are guaranteed the job. Well, you are guaranteed something.”

Now to keep yourself updated take a sneak peek into the common Internet scams recently:

Mystery Shopper Scam

Beware fake cheques or being fooled into a western union scam.

Cheque Processing at Home Scam

Due to some spurious tax reason, we need someone in your country to take in cheques for us, keep 10% and send us the rest by w-u of course, fake cheque scam. Laundering stolen cheques are also another type of scam for cheques.

Work at Home Scams

All you have to do is to look up this in Google and you will find it flooded with the results. Most of them require money up front. There are a lot many examples “Make ££££ at home ask me how?”, craft work where they promise to buy something you have to purchase to assemble for them; sadly your work is never up to scratch et cetera.

So be smart enough to stand up against the scams in the tough internet world out there and to spot the same.

There are common scams that turn up all over the internet and unfortunately, even on Gumtree.

Oratory Commerce Liverpool prefers to take the safer route and employs only legitimate companies to post vacancy adverts, ones like the Media Circus. Happy news for both though, recently, on 10th November 2010, Media Circus had been declared as a Top 10 finalist in the Most Improved Recruiter 2010 category of Jobsite’s 2010 Recruit Rank Awards (www.recruitrank.co.uk)

The best thing for Media Circus about winning the accolade from RecruitRank Awards is that they are the only accolades in the industry where both the finalists as well as the winners are chosen by the feedback from candidates and not by a panel of industry judges like others – something that is recognised as the best practice and quality customer service in recruitment agencies.

A look into Internet scam issues:

Women have been found to be the most affected when it comes to online scams, according to a recent research. The research also brought out the fact that the age-group that was affected the most was women between the ages 25-34.

The research was carried out with the aim to identify the people who were able to spot as well as respond properly to seven online scam scenarios. Almost 2000 consumers were given tests which ranged from being able to identify sham Facebook pages to checking their response to sale of counterfeit goods online as well as competition scams.

It was found that women who were mostly in the age group of 25-34 were likely to fail in as much as 6 out of the 7 tests. The gender as well as the number also depended on the type of scams and the perfect example for that was that among those who fell for confidence tricks, 53% were men.

The research concluded revealing the fact that with internet scams on the rise anyone who uses the internet (no matter the frequency) could be affected. New tricks, such as pharming, work by redirecting the user's web browser, he said, so that when they type in a legitimate web address, they are redirected without knowing to a bogus site that appears genuine.

"People then happily type in their personal details and don't know they are being scammed before it's too late," it said.

Another risk that online users faced was the risks associated with people letting out too much of personal information on popular social networking sites like Facebook, even quoting this social networking site to be a goldmine for scammers.

The research results saw Oratory’s girls (and boys!) set about upping our security measures, Facebook has been privatized and Twitter is being carefully monitored. Speaking of which, come and say hi and add us as a friend on http://www.facebook.com/oratory.commerce .