Scams and Hoaxes

you from your money and or personal information. So this episode is related to episodes I've done about fishing, and I'll likely tread some of the same ground, but I feel it's an important topic and while I have touched on it before, it always pays to go back and re examined this and to remind ourselves of how unethical, dishonest people might target us and how we might be vulnerable to them. Being aware means we're more likely able

to avoid becoming a victim. And I say this is someone who has fallen for some of these scams before. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but you know, it was one of those valuable lessons I learned. And fortunately it wasn't a super expensive lesson for me to learn,

but it could have been. And uh, I thought, maybe to spare other people the same learning experience I had through experience, we could talk about this, and so this episode was prompted by something that I actually encountered while I was on Facebook the morning of the day that I'm recording this. So I'm actually one of those Facebook users who once in a blue moon, I will click

through on an ad. Sometimes I see ads for stuff that I find really interesting, so I'll go ahead and investigate it, And sometimes it just turns out to be a waste of time, Like I'll figure out the thing that was being advertised and what's actually on the respective site don't quite match up, for example, and I'll realize, oh, well,

this isn't for me. Or there was one case where I was seeing a preview for a show and it looked like a spectacular show, but I didn't recognize the name of the theater, and I clicked through and discovered that the theater is in Seattle, Washington. Well, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and those two places are not close to each other. They are on opposite sides of the United States, so it's not likely that I'm going to get around to

seeing that show. So once in a while I'll click through if it looks interesting, but I realized, oh, you know, I kind of I could have saved myself some effort if I had just realized up front that this doesn't really you know, this isn't really relevant to me. So eventually you can get into some territory where things get a little questionable. Maybe it's not just this doesn't really represent what I was looking at, but this is an actual attempt to misdirect, to to capture, to trick someone.

And what really gets my dinner up are the more brazen attempts to scan people or to pull a bait and switch. So the example that prompted this episode was for a silicone mask. Now, as I record this, Halloween is coming up. I'm recording this on October six, two thousand nineteen, so these scammers are jumping on that opportunity

to showcase what are truly incredible masks. I mean, these are actual silicone masks that are really well made, and supposedly these online stores that are advertising on Facebook have these masks in stock on their sites. The mask I

first saw was Belile the Demon. It's a silicone mask of a devilish looking creation, and the silicone allows the mask to conform closely with the face of the person who's wearing the mask, so the lips on the mask fit right around the wearer's lips, and that means you can actually open and close your mouth and the mask will open and close its mouth. It conforms so well. It looks very natural, and the mask looks and credibly lifelike.

And they're great. I mean this, this Belial one is a great example of how a silicone mask can be a really amazing work, and uh, I was immediately intrigued by it. The ad had a video of a man trying on the mask. It was an unboxing video, and he had the mask on a mannequin head and he pulls the mask off of it and then he puts it onto himself and demonstrates how well it moves with his facial features. It was a great demonstration of the

masks features and mobility. So I was curious. I clicked through. I was thinking, how much is the store selling this mask for? And what I saw immediately raised red flags in my head. So the price for the mask on this website was listed as thirty four dollars cents, marked down from around fifty dollars, and I knew immediately that could not possibly be legit. I've seen masks in Halloween stores that cost more than that, and we're not nearly

as sophisticated as this particular mask was. So then I did a Google search for the mask and found the actual Bellal the Demon mask on several specialty mask and costume shops, and those prices ranged from around six hundred to eight hundred dollars, so thirty five bucks would be quite a markdown. Moreover, I found the unboxing video and the review video that was playing as part of this ad. I found it on YouTube and it was completely independent

of the store. The guy who was doing the video had no connection whatsoever to the online store that was advertising this mask. In fact, the YouTuber had posted in the comments section and penned the comment that the video had been appropriated for these scam ads and said, don't believe what you see on Facebook, because those ads are four masks that look nothing like this one. They are cheap knockoffs, or maybe not even knockoffs. They're just terrible masks, uh,

and you're getting a bait and switch. And it proved there was no connection between the video that played as part of this advertisement and the actual product that was being sold. Uh. And it's I'm sure incredibly frustrating for him to see a video he made being used in this way because it it sort of implicates him in

this even though he has no connection to it. And I know that as a content creator myself, if I were to come across a piece of content where I appear to be advertising for something marketing something and I never agreed to that, I would feel really betrayed by that. Then I went a step further. The shop that was linked through this Facebook ad had a contact page, so

I clicked on the contact page. I wanted to see what was there, and then was an email listed there, which was already unusual that there was actually an email address where you could send a question or a comment or whatever. But the domain for the email address was different from the domain in the stores you are l. So the stores you are l was one thing, and the email address was totally not connected to that, And

that's another red flag. You would expect a legitimate business to use email addresses that reflect the stores you are l. You would expect uniformity across that, or at least an email address of a parent company for an outlet, but none of that was the case here. So I did a Google search for the email. I highlighted the email address, and I did a Google search for that, and up came another dozen online stores that also included that email as the contact email. None of these stores appeared to

be connected to each other. They all had different names. Some of the names were really weird, like there was one that was about yoga, supposedly, not that the store was about yoga, but that was what the name was. But they none of them had any connection to each other, and that was another big red flag. Then I decided I wasn't finished yet. I decided to use a tool called scam doc dot com. That's s C A M D O C dot com. This is a tool that

analyzes website u r l s and email domains. And just so you guys know, I have no connection to that service. I'm recommending it as a user, but I have no you know, I don't know those guys. I don't have any other connection to it. I just used that tool myself. The tool assigns a reliability score to websites and emails, and the score is based off of several criteria for example, how long has the site been around.

Younger sites are less trub worthy than older sites, And in the case of every site I checked, each one of those was younger than six months, so they hadn't even been around for six months. That's a warning flag right there. Also are the sites details such as where in the world it was registered? Are those details publicly viewable? Do you know who the registrar is? Do you know

you know where it was registered? If not, that's another big warning flag there, and that contributes to the reliability score. So in case you're curious, the score I got back from this particular shop that prompted this entire episode was a hearty one percent, meaning the analysis tool concluded the site posed a serious risk of being a scam operation.

It concluded that the site hadn't been around long, the details behind who registered it and where it was registered weren't public, and based off similar sites, the tool predicted that this particular shop wouldn't be around for very long. It was sort of a fly by night thing, which is not a good indication that you're dealing with someone on the up and up. Now, I reported the ad as misleading and a scam to Facebook there's a little tool. If you ever see a Facebook ad and you're thinking, well,

this looks shifty and I want to report it. There are these little three dots in the upper right corner. If you click on that, one of the options there's to report an ad, and then you have different options on why you reported it. So I chose misleading and scam. But here's the thing. Now, remember when I said that searching that email address brought up numerous other websites, all of them similar shops to the one I had just visited. In fact, many of them were using the same web template,

although they had different names. Well that's just a tiny sample of the bogus businesses that are all using this exact same tactic on Facebook. While I had reported the original ad that I saw, and while Facebook would then block that ad from appearing in my feed, ever again, Facebook couldn't block all the identical ads that were registered to different stores. So I kept seeing the same or similar ads for this mask or masks that were just like this one, maybe of a slightly different design, but

they were also high quality silicone masks. I kept seeing these sorts of ads, one after another, and I would go through the process of blocking saying misleading or scam and then scroll through it and yet another one would pop up. So this doesn't stop me from reporting the bogus ads because I don't want anyone to fall victim to them if I can help it. But it's very discouraging.

It's telling me that there are several people, maybe several companies, most likely in places like China, that are popping up and using this same approach to cast as wide a net as possible to catch as many suckers as possible. So I likened it to squishing a bug in a room that's teeming with thousands of bugs. Sure, there's one fewer bug in the mix, but there's still thousands more to deal with. Okay, So what's actually at stake here? Why am I so head up about this? Well, some

of these sites actually do sell you something. It's not likely to look like the image or the video that was attached to the original ad, but it's something. It might be the wrong product entirely. It's almost certainly a cheap, poorly made product, and you might chalk it up as just a learning experience like I did in the past, and you might say, well, I won't let that happen to me again, and you'll think, well, I'm out however much money I spent. But that's as far as the

the damage is gonna go. But you're still out of however much money the thing costs. And nobody wants to just throw money away. Maybe it's not that much money. Maybe you decide you're going to eat the cost and you'll just deal with it, but no one wants to do that some. In fact, many of these sites that are up there say they offer free refunds, but that

itself comes with a set of caveats. So I saw one of these sites that listed uh product like this and said refunds are free within the first thirty days of purchase. But then and another part of the exact same site, I saw a discussion that explained that all refund requests must first go through a verification process, they have to be reviewed by a team, and that you have to submit your refund request within seven days of

having received the product. There's no indication of how long that process is supposed to last either, So it may be that, oh, yeah, you get a free refund within thirty days, but if the review process lasts longer than thirty days, then maybe the company argues, well, it doesn't fall within that thirty day period, and so you're not entitled to a refund. In addition, while the refund might be free, return shipping is almost never uh an included benefit.

So in other words, if you want a refund, you're gonna have to pay to ship the thing back to where it came from. And because these items are mostly being shipped from places like China, you know, primarily China, you're looking at shipping costs that can be much higher than what you paid for the product in the first place. So, yeah, you can get a refund. You could send the stuff back, but it's actually going to cost you more money to send it back than it did for you to purchase it.

So you would be losing money on the refund. And that's assuming the company actually refunds your money. So there's no incentive to actually pursue a refund. It would cost you more money than you would get. Moreover, since many of these companies are overseas and again mostly in China, there's not a lot you can do legally to go after your money. You can't really hold the company accountable.

There's very little chance that the Chinese government's going to jump in and say, oh, you're you're cheating people overseas out of their money. Bad, that's probably not going to happen. So the bogus businesses are protected and can generate revenue by depending upon naive customers who take the bait, and thanks to Facebook's algorithms for serving up ads, those ads

can reach a pretty big base of potential customers. So even if you only get one bite out of a thousand, if millions of people are seeing the ad, that still adds up. And this brings me to another red flag. Though, I think it's pretty safe to say we've established from this example that I'm citing that it definitely was not a legit business. When I visited the shop by clicking through the ad, I decided I would also look at their home page to get a look at the types

of stuff that the store sold. If all the stuff on the store had been thematically linked, let's say that they were all like Halloween or cost supplies, or maybe even party supplies, I might have felt like it was a more legitimate business that perhaps engaged in some bad marketing decisions, primarily snagging someone else's video without their permission to act as part of their ad. But instead I saw an eclectic mix of products across all sorts of

different categories. They had wigs, not not costume wigs, but fashion wigs. They had kitchen items, they had automotive items, and more. There's stuff from you know, no rhyme or reason to what was on there, the stuff from every conceivable category, unless you happen to know how Facebook's algorithms work, in which case you would see a rhyme and reason

to this approach. See Advertisers can tag their ads with keywords, and this is important because Facebook can then use that in order to serve the ads to the most receptive audiences, in other words, to pair up ads to potential customers. So your activity on Facebook and on the web at large teaches Facebook what you like and what you don't like.

So if you've liked certain pages on Facebook or images on Facebook, or you've engaged in conversations, or you've shared certain posts, all of that activity is logged and analyzed by Facebook, and Facebook starts to build a profile of you. What are the things you're interested in, What are the things you like? What are the things you tend to

ignore or or you seem not to like. That way, Facebook can say, well, let's serve up the ads that are most likely going to be relevant to this person, and that way you get ads that most closely aligned with your interests. So if you've liked a lot of posts about cars, for example, you're more likely to see

ads related to car stuff. Similarly, if you've been browsing the web for certain types of products, you're more likely to see those types of products advertised to you as well, due to web tracking tools that lots of advertisers and web page administrators use. So if you're running a scam company, one in which you send out cheap products for low prices, but they're presented to look like incredible deals on high quality items, it behooves you to have a wide selection

of crab to pedal. On Facebook, you can arrange for ads on multiple categories of products. So some people will get that Halloween mask ad I was talking about because their interests happened to fall in that kind of category. Some other people might get hair care products I rarely see those for some reason. Or they might get automotive

accessories or computer peripherals or kitchen gadgets. One online store might have dozens of ads running on Facebook, with each ad served to a different segment of the population that has been predisposed to shopping for those items, as indicated by their online behaviors. Now, I want to be clear here, I don't think the actual process of matching ads to

users is totally awful. I do think it tends to be pretty invasive, But then I also think it's nice to encounter ads that align with my interests as opposed to seeing ads that have no real relevance to me. I don't need to see ads for childcare products and services, for example, because I don't have kids, But if you serve me up ads for doggy toys, I'm all over it.

So that part I don't really object to that much, though I recognize it gets pretty creepy when you realize how well Facebook knows its users based on the massive amounts of data we users provide every time we're online, even if we're not currently using Facebook while we're online. What I really object to is Facebook's failure to vet

advertising in any meaningful way. I think as users, we each have a responsibility to use critical thinking and to protect ourselves and I'll talk more about that later in this episode. But I also think Facebook and other platforms have a responsibility to be good stewards of their platforms

and to weed out scams that target users. I don't subscribe to the philosophy that Facebook should be just a passive platform that allows this to happen, because the company is getting paid by these hoax shops to post ads. Facebook is benefiting from this arrangement. It profits from the whole process. To me, that makes them at least partly

responsible for the perpetuation of scams. I've got a little more to say about Facebook's role in this, but first let's take a quick break for you know, a real ad. In the UK, Facebook was hit by a defamation lawsuit by Martin Lewis, who is a financial expert who runs a financial advice service. Lewis sued Facebook because there were ads running on Facebook that feats Lewis's image or it implied that he had endorsed various services with which he

had no connection. He successfully argued that these services were profiting off of his reputation and his image without his permission, and that Facebook was letting it happen. Moreover, after reporting the issue, Facebook continued running the ads for some time. Facebook responded by rolling out a tool that lets users report ads for various reasons, including for being misleading or a scam. That's similar to the tool I used when I reported the ad, and I'm in the United States,

not in the UK. And yes, that is a positive step, it's a good one, but it's also a reactive step, right. It only works after people have either noticed something hinky is going on, or they didn't notice it in time and they were victimized, and then they respond to Facebook. That's really too late, you know you you would prefer to see an approach that prevents this stuff from ever reaching an audience in the first place, as opposed to

reaching an audience. And now it's the audience's responsibility to say, hey, this doesn't look right to me. So by the time someone on Facebook actually takes that step, the ad has

already been served up to potentially millions of people. I suggest that perhaps Facebook should develop some sort of process to try and catch these things before the ads are accepted to run on the site, to verify that the party that's purchasing the ad is in fact what they say they are and granted this is way more work for Facebook, but it would go a long way to improving the reputation of the company, which has been under fire recently for multiple reasons, not just the dodgy ads

appearing on the site. Now, since I started writing up these notes, Facebook has sent me a few notifications telling me that their teams are reviewing the various ads I have flagged as being misleading or a scam. Now, I don't have a high level of confidence that this is going to result in very much other than maybe Facebook telling me to chill out. I'm fairly sure the review teams won't take the steps I took to investigate those instances.

At the time I'm writing this, I must have reported at least fifteen or twenty ads, all using similar video many of them using the exact same video clips and the same images, and all marketing items for far less than what they go for elsewhere. And when I say far less, I'm talking in the hundreds of dollars less like the too good to be true level of a sale.

Facebook has posted some tips to help users avoid these scams, and they include making sure that the posted ad or corresponding product page includes clear details about the product, like its dimensions or its weight, as well as its quality,

and that there should also be your photographs of the product. Now, while fuzzy photos are pretty much a dead giveaway that it's a fake, I also counter that it's very easy these days to lift good images online and there's no shortage of high res photographs of tons of different products, particularly for stuff like the mask I was referring to earlier, and so it doesn't take very much to steal those images and then use them for another purpose on another site.

And you can always do a reverse image search as a user to see if something you're looking at has been nicked from somewhere else, but that's yet another step that the user has to take. The onus falls on

you so that you aren't made into a victim. Another tip that Facebook gives is that the seller should include clear information about the amount of time it will take to ship items to the customer, how long will it take to get from door to door, and also whether or not the seller offers up tracking information so that users can track orders as they go through the shipping process. Companies only list something like a dispatch time. That's another

warning flag. Also legitimate companies should have a clear way to contact customer service. So in the pages I looked at the morning and that I'm recording this, I saw email addresses for some unnamed person who is supposedly the customer service representative. But the email address didn't indicate that in of itself right. The email address wasn't like customer

representative at store dot com. Instead, it would be something seemingly random like l f U r Z three one one at b E r Q dot shop, and it has no connection to whatever the U r L for the website is at all. That's not exactly a confidence booster. In a couple of other cases, I saw an online field into which you would type your email address, and it would include a promise that a customer service rep would get in touch with you, quote unquote soon. I

have no clue how honest that claim is. And in a few cases there was no contact page at all, so there's no obvious way for you to get in contact with the company. That is another clear warning. While these tips from Facebook are helpful, they still place the responsibility of not getting scammed on the end user. There doesn't seem to be much acknowledgement that Facebook shoulders at least some of the blame here, and that the site has to find a better way to evaluate businesses before

accepting ads from them. The company has stated that bad shopping experiences hurt everyone, not just the user but also Facebook, and that's true, so you would think the company would have a pretty strong incentive to prevent these ads from going onto the platform. But I guess that money all spends the same, whether it's from a legitimate business or not. And yes, I am bitter about this because I hate when people get scammed out of their cash or their

personal information. Now there's an opinion and the Harvard Business Review that I feel really gets to why this has become such a troubling issue for Facebook users. The article is titled Facebook's oversight board is not Enough, and it's by Dipayan Gosh And I apologize for doing a terrible job pronouncing that name. That's entirely due to my own ignorance, So I apologize for that. But the article is really good.

It points out that Facebook's business model is such that depends upon ads, and I'm going to quote a passage, so here's the quote. The same model lies at the center of the consumer Internet as a whole, and is based on maximizing consumer engagement and injecting ads throughout our digital experience. It relies on collecting personal data and on sophisticated algorithms that curate social feeds and target those ads.

Because there is no earnest consideration of what consumers wish to or should see in this equation, they are subjected to whatever content the platform believes will maximize profits. These practices in turn generate negative externalities, of which disinformation is only one end quote. And in this case, the article was more about fake news and propaganda and how Facebook is incented to share that because it's part and parcel with its business model. That wasn't Facebook's intent when they

built that business model. That's a reflection of how people recognized how Facebook's business model works, and then they gamed the system. By knowing how the system works, they took

advantage of it, and that's the issue. Now. I didn't really go into other problems with Facebook ads, such as it's shifting policies with regard to political ads, which is a huge can of worms here in the United States right now, But that's because it is really another kettle of fish, I said, ken of worms, kettle of fish. I'm gonna mix metaphors left and right, come at me.

Ultimately it gets wrapped in a bigger discussion about propaganda, and frankly, I am exhausted over the concept of political ads for the moment, probably for the next year and a half. So I'm going to spare all of that discussion for some future episode when I'm not as irritated by it. Instead, let's talk about other common scam techniques. Well,

will slowly ease off Facebook here for a second. And I've touched on this next topic in the past because I remember getting really upset about it when I chatted about the topic with my then co host Chris Pallette. So this was an old, old episode of Tech Stuff, and it's about hiring scams. So these scams target a very vulnerable population, people who are looking for a job. Maybe they are out of work and they're looking to actually find job so they can make ends meet. Maybe

they're just looking for a better opportunity. They're in a job already, but it's not a great one. They want a better chance. Now, as I'm sure many of you know, hunting for a job is exhausting, and it can get pretty discouraging if it starts to take a while. And I've been in that situation myself. I worked for a company for seven years and that company then eliminated my position. I wasn't fired, I just didn't have a job anymore.

That the the definition of that, and the difference between being fired and not having a job was kind of lost on me at the time. For three months, I worked hard trying to land a gig that I really wanted to do. I thought, this is my chance to not just do something I can do, but do something I really want to do. I had stars in my eyes. Well that didn't pan out after three months, so then I spent the following three months trying to land a

decent gig at all. I ended up working for a company not that different from the one that let me go in the first place. This was very rough on me and my psyche, but I had been out of work for nearly six months at that point. It was really tough on me. Well, scammers know that people who are looking for jobs are in that vulnerable space, and by promising a little, the scammers can get what they're after.

They might be after the person's money, they might be after their personal information, or they might be after their cooperation. And one amounts to an illegal operation, and they're probably not upfront about that. They're probably not telling the applicant, hey, just so you know, what we're doing is illegal, So the applicant becomes an unwilling participant of a crime. This practice also gets me really angry. I hate seeing folks who are trying to get a job be targeted like that.

Often these are people who can least afford the hardships that could follow if they're tricked by the scammers. Meanwhile, the scammers are profiting off people who are just trying to improve their own lives. It is gross. So these schemes tend to fall into a few broad categories, and some of them fall into just outright theft. So a common example of this is a payment representative scam. And here's how the scam works. The fraudsters identify a mark.

This could be a totally cold call on their part. You know, they're just pulling off email addresses and sending out emails hoping to get a hit. Maybe they're using some job hunting sites to have a more targeted approach to their marks, or they might even post a job on a site to see if they get any bites. However they do this, it doesn't really matter whenever they make that first contact. Here's how the supposed job pans out. So let's assume you are the person who has been

targeted by these fraudsters. They claim that the company they represent needs someone in your home country to handle some financial transactions because for some reason, the company itself has difficulty working within the financial institutions in your country. So this is a company that exists outside your country and needs to be able to process payments inside your country. Your job is to accept payments from this company, typically for really large sums of money. You're meant to deposit

those payments in the form of checks. Check comes to you, you're supposed to deposit that check into your own personal account. Then you're meant to send on a payment from the amount that was given to you to some other entity, and you deduct your representative fee from that amount. So let's use an example because this gets confusing otherwise. All right, So you have accepted the job of payment representative from this company. The company tells you you get a ten

percent fee off of all the transactions you process. The company sends you a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and you deposit the check into your account, and the company says, we need you to then send a payment to this other entity. And you pay out thirteen thousand, five hundred dollars because you deducted your ten percent your fifteen hundred dollars, so fifteen hundred dollars of that fifteen thousand dollars is

yours to keep. You send out the other thirteen thousand, five hundred and then the scam becomes apparent because the fifteen thousand dollar check bounces. Meanwhile, you've already paid out thousand, five hundred dollars from your own account to that person that the company indicated. You're on the line for all of that money. In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service the i r S would want to talk to

you about that fifteen grand. The bank would expect you to cover the amount of money you paid out, and the fraud sters get away with your money and your left holding the bag. It is a pretty awful scheme. Another scheme is the re shipper scam. This scam seems to ask a pretty simple favor of the employee. Your job is to accept packages that are sent to you.

Then you either forward those packages onward to another address, or you might even have to open up a package, pull stuff out of the package, pack it into smaller boxes, and then send those packages on their way. But this raises a question, why would any company need a middleman to do this? Why not just send the packages directly to the customers. Well, the most common reason for this

is that the packages actually contain illegal or stolen materials. Typically, it means the fraudsters have used stolen credit cards to purchase items online and then they use your address as the shipping address. You are then responsible for reshipping these packages to some other destination, frequently to an overseas address, where the goods will enter the black market and be

sold for a much higher markup price. By accepting the package, you effectively become an accessory to the crime, and when you forward it on those packages came from you, not the original criminals. It's a way for the criminals to get illegal goods to a destination while insulating themselves from prosecution, and when the credit card gets reported as stolen, the point of contact for those fraudulent charges is you because you're the person that the fraudsters were using for the

shipping address. Yeah. I've got some more job hiring scams to chat about in a second, but first let's take another quick break. Okay, So the previous examples I gave of job hiring scams that you'll typically find line are all about involving you the mark in crimes that ultimately rest on you while the real criminals continue their illegal activities.

But many job hiring scams are more about harvesting personal information from people, often to do stuff like open up credit cards in those those employees names, or to get access to those employees bank accounts, or otherwise exploit them in some way. And you might encounter these scams on social media platforms like Facebook or linked In, or you might get targeted by them in an email that's attempting

to phish the data out of you. The job postings typically use a few common tactics in an effort to get you to lower your guard and to respond quickly without thinking too much. For example, there's often a sense of urgency that goes along with these messages. That is, if you don't respond quickly, the opportunity is going to go away. Frequently, the job description will sound pretty simple and yet could have of a really generous salary range

quoted as part of the gig. The message might also state that there's no experience necessary, which, if you think about it, undercuts the whole argument that you are the ideal candidates, since if no experience is necessary, you'd figure lots of people would qualify for the job. Another warning sign is if there's no interview as part of the

whole process. Maybe the supposed recruiter says that the interactions across something like instant messenger or email exchanges are enough to forego the need to have an in person interview. That's often a way for the scammer to avoid the pitfalls of you getting wise and asking some tricky questions. They just sidestep that entirely, and they appeal to your vanity. Oh, you're so amazing, we don't even need to have an interview. You're hired. Well, it's a very flattering thing to hear.

Often these scammers will say they came across your resume on a job recruiting site. Sometimes it will be a site that you've never even visited, or heard of and yeah, that's a warning sign. Or they might even claim that you actively applied for the job, and they're counting on the fact that maybe you you feel like you forgot about it, maybe you were applying to a lot of jobs and so I don't know, maybe I did, or

maybe you're just thinking, oh, shut up. They this is an opportunity, don't question it a dead giveaway in these circumstances. If it is. If there's an email contact for you to reach out to and the domain on that email contact doesn't match whatever the company is that's supposedly reaching out to you. Some scammers like to use recognizable, real companies when they reach out. They know that it will get more hits than if they just make a company

out of whole cloth. Plus, if you rely on an existing company as your cover, you can trade upon that company's reputation as well as it's pre existing presence of the company online. Right if I say that I am coming from X y Z company and it's a real company, there's already a website out there. I don't have to create anything. If you make up a company, you need

to go through some extra trouble. It's pretty suspicious to come across a company that's using the Internet to recruit people when that same company doesn't have a web page. So scammers typically have to make a choice. Do you pose as someone from a reputable company that really exists, or do you create a fake company complete with a website to help lure in job hunters. Those posing as representatives for an existing company are often found out when

their emails do not match that company in question. They also run another risk. You could always reach out to the real company to confirm that a message actually did originate from within that company, and if you get a negative response, if you say, hey, I got this job offer, I want to make sure that it's legitimate, and the response you get is this is the first we've ever heard of it, you know it's most likely a scam making up a company can get around that problem, right,

because now you're controlling the whole lie. It's not just well, hopefully they don't reach out to the real company because there is no real company to reach out to. So in this case, if you are the one targeted, you have no other authority to turn to in order to confirm that a message is legitimate. But this also requires a lot more work on the part of the scammers. Several years ago, a friend of mine was job hunting and got an offer that seemed too good to be true.

So that was a warning right there. So she asked for my help to investigate to make sure it was a legitimate offer and not just a scam. You know. She thought that it sounded like a really promising job, but she was a little worried. So she forwarded a message that she received and she sent it to me, and I did some digging, and it turned out her suspicions were very well placed. The company was a supposed architectural firm that was looking to hire someone in an

in the straight of position. And I can't even remember what the name of this fake company was anymore. This happened years ago, but I do remember the process. The message referred my friend to the company website, and so I visited the website and it was pretty slick. It looked nice and had a decent design to it, and it included photographs of supposed construction sites that this company

claimed were official projects. So they're saying, you know, we're responsible for building this amazing building at the x y Z address, but none of this looked legit to me. For one thing, the website actually looked a little template ish, as if the person who had made the site had used a web hosting service that comes with templates for web pages, and then they built out a few web pages, but they didn't go too much trouble to customize it

beyond the generic template. I also looked at the address for the supposed construction site and I plugged it into Google Maps to take a look at it from there, and that presented a very different image than what was on their web page, and it was clearly not the same location despite the claims. That's when I knew something was up. Then I did something that proved to me that this was a total scam. I found a paragraph of text that I found to be a little odd.

The wording was just a little off and and unusual, So I highlighted the text and I searched Google for that text. Now, if this were a legit site for a local business, maybe one where the web administrator doesn't have the best way with words, but otherwise it's completely legitimate. The only response I should have seen from Google would have been that one web page, but instead I got seven or eight different hits, two different web pages, all

with the exact same wording. Going to those links, I found duplicates of the website that I had just visited. The company name was different from site to site, but all the content was exactly the same. They're all located in different cities, and they even all had pictures of that same construction site, but the address had been localized to whatever site, you know, whatever place the company was

claiming to be in. So there was one for Atlanta, Georgia, there was one for Phoenix, there was one for Helena, Montana. They all mysteriously had the exact same content, same staff working for the company, and exact same construction site, just in different parts of the United States. I alerted my friend, who was glad that I had caught the scam, but she was obviously discouraged that what initially seemed to be a real job offer had turned out to be a trap.

Now fortunately she found out before it went any further, but was still a discouraging thing to happen when you're in the middle of a job search. Now. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here about uncovered ring this one. It was a pretty sloppy attempt when all things are considered too. I was able to go about this investigation because I could think critically about it. I care for my friends, but I was not as

emotionally invested in this opportunity as she was. I had fewer blinders up because I wasn't counting on this being a real offer. If I had been hunting for a job, if I had been in my friends position, I might very well have totally bought that scam, hook line and sinker. The investigation I did was pretty simple stuff. It didn't require any advanced search techniques. Had just involved looking at the information that was presented and then doing my best

to fact check it. When things didn't match up, I figured I was onto a trick and that's it. And the fact that there were several duplicate websites told me I had hit upon some sort of scheme. There's one other type of job scam I should mention. This one is harder to spot, but it's also a crappy thing to do to people. And this is the old bait

and switch. This is when a company advertises a particular position in order to get applicants, but then when someone actually does apply and perhaps comes in for an interview. The company reveals that the position that the applicant is interested in isn't actually available, maybe it doesn't even exist, maybe it was never available. Instead, they're offering a different job that is available. Most likely it's a job that's not nearly as desirable as the one that was advertised.

It might be grunt work for low pay. It's the type of job that could be difficult to fill on its own if you were to list it, so they might not get any applicants if they had listed the real job, or maybe they would only get people that the company isn't keen on hiring in the first place, So the bait and switch might bring in, you know, a better class of applicant. And all it takes is being dishonest to trick someone into coming in for an interview.

Companies that do this know that people who are looking for a job might be tempted to say yes to a less desirable position because it's still represents an opportunity, even if it's for a job that they wouldn't normally apply for if they just saw it online by itself. Don't fall for this one, either, folks. If you wouldn't apply for the job if you saw it listed online.

Don't take it just because it's offered to you. No one will end up being happy with that decision in the long run, and you don't ever want to work for a company that depends on tricks to get people to work for them. Now, I don't think I can really go into stuff like multi level marketing businesses or pyramid schemes, which are not necessarily the same thing, but frequently an MLM can turn into a pyramid scheme. The

two can share a lot of qualities. I think that is better left as a subject for a different podcast, because it's not as dependent upon technology as the variations I've been speaking about today. Once again, I gotta put forth the argument for critical thinking. It's all about asking important questions and looking for the most truthful answers. It's about not taking things at face value and digging a

little deeper. This is particularly important when you've got a strong motivation to believe the story being told to you. If you have a predisposition to believe, you really got to employ that critical thinking. If you're a person looking for a new job, or you're someone who's really hunting for a bargain, You're more liable to believe the lie because lie is telling you what you want to hear,

So you've got to really use that critical thinking. The motivation for believing is what these con artists are counting on. Your motivation is doing the work for these con artists, whether it's an ad on social media, a job listing, or a crowdfunding campaign for a seemingly incredible idea. It's always good to check your expectations and do some research first.

You may find that everything is totally legit and then you're good to go, or you might save yourself some money or your credit score, your bank account, or other things that are equally important. So it pays to be a critical thinker. And that wraps up this episode. Totally inspired by my Facebook experience this morning. It's something I really am very passionate about. I do not want people

to be taken advantage of. I want a world where con artists don't get any opportunities and they realize that they need to spend their efforts doing something else rather than tricking people and making their lives more difficult. So let's make it hard for those jerks, shall we. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email. The addresses tex stuff at how stuff works dot com. If you want you learn more about the show, go to our website that's tech stuff

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