CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A new warning about stay-at-home job scams if you happen to be looking for a new job, and these scams are being populated through reputable career websites.
“My gosh, in 24 hours, I was been scammed two times,” said Linda, who didn't want her last name used.
Linda worked in the travel industry and like so many others in that industry, lost her job. Linda joined the millions of others who are looking for jobs and checks job boards daily, herein lies the opportunity for a scam artist.
“It’s no face to face, they want more of a chat,” said Linda.
That’s a huge red flag if you can’t see them or even hear their voice. It’s likely they will start asking for things, maybe your personal information, and then maybe even for you to buy training materials or cover some random administration costs.
Experts said don’t send them anything and certainly be skeptical of requests for wire transfers and prepaid debits.
“We had some that use real company names, they are very good at spoofing real company names to put up a good smokescreen," said Tom Bartholomy with the Better Business Bureau ."Go to the actual website and look at the job posting, do not click on links they send you, go to the actual website where the job should exist."
One of the sites with fake jobs? CareerBuilder.
“CareerBuilder takes the threat of fraud seriously. We work with a third-party organization to actively validate that businesses are legitimate when they post content on our site, and have built-in safeguards to remove accounts if fraudulent activity is reported. Additionally, there are educational resources available across our website to help job seekers during their search on how to report identified fraudulent behavior” said a CareerBuilder spokesperson.
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If you confront what you believe is a scammer on the phone, they will likely end the conversation immediately.