Hello There!!

The pandemic made many peoples life miserable by different forms of economical crisis like job loss, pay cuts, crashing businesses and uncertainty around their work. Both private and public sector undertakings got affected by the scenario and several studies show that the eagerness to find ways to diversify one's income has increased like never before.

As a result, the number of people who are taking advantage of the situation for their benefit by scamming individuals with fake job offers and taking money out of their pockets is also higher in the graph.

More often, the job scam appears as a normal job offer with interview timings, offer letter and designation details of your employer. These people get your email ID and other details from the dark web or any unauthorised services and may send you the offer into your email or they would even make a call with you to discuss the offer. So, It is advisable to don't share your details with any website you don't trust or seem unaccredited.

The following methods can be helpful to identify whether a job offer is legitimate or a scam.

1. Always check whether the job offer is coming into your primary email or in the spam folder. For services like Gmail, they have an option to mark the emails as spam if any other users of Gmail have already reported it as fake earlier.
2. Examine the email address and company URL for spoofing. If the actual company name is companyname.com the scammers may use company-name.com
3. There is a sense of urgency. The recruiter may push you to accept the offer immediately.
4. The job description is not at all precise.
5. Be cautious if you get the offer immediately after an interview that was scheduled for namesake.
6.  Research the web with keywords of the mentioned company name and “fake job” or “spam”. There are several complaints already registered on consumer complaints websites regarding this.
7. Check whether the mentioned email ids of the employer is official or personal. A proper offer letter should be sent from the official ID only.
8. If the remuneration is something that far exceeds your expectations, alert with the offer and proceedings.
9. Check for grammar, capitalization or punctuation mistakes in the email content. However, most scammers are good at making the content believable and official.
10. Enquire about the company by directly contacting the official email or phone number.
11. Discuss with people or colleagues who are aware of the company.

So, if you encounter any kind of scamming activity in future, please do report the same and inform your circle as well.

Stay safe. Stay healthy.

Thanks for your time😊