Craigslist Scam

I’ll admit that I am a bit new to being on this side of the job hunt; the job seeker helper side that is. It is a fun and fascinating world that, with the unemployment rate where it is, is also a very large community. Recently in my travels through the internet’s job hunt world I’ve noticed there are a lot of questions and fears surrounding job scams.  And Craigslist seems to be the main proprietor of these fears.

After countless hours of research and some conversations with some really smart people in the employment industry I’ve put together the top five Craigslist scams that job seekers keep running in to.

If you have arrived here looking for scam validation and you don’t see your scam listed, just approach a job inquiry on Craigslist just like you would anything else on Craiglist (and leave your scam in the comments to help out others).  Craigslist also has some information on scams and their community is pretty helpful.

Excess Funds Scam

The Excess Funds Scam is probably the most popular scam on Craigslist.  The scam started in the buy and sell sections of Craigslist, but has since been re-appropriated to the jobs section.

The scam works by the “employer” sending you a check, or some other form of money that you are to deposit in your bank account.  The check of course is fake and your bank will figure it out in a few days.  However, the scammer tells you that you now have to transfer some of this money to another account, minus your wages.  And if they can convince you to send your money off before the bank notices the first check was bad, then mission successful, they’ve got your money.

This scam comes in all forms but the popular career choice at the moment seems to be with personal assistants.  The scammer explains they are out of town and your payment has to work this way.

Affiliate Link Swaps

A lot of companies make money on the internet through lead generation.  Basically, they try and get people to fill out forms and then sell their information.  This is not the scam, that is just life.

There are also companies that offer affiliate programs that puts a structure in place for affiliates to send them leads and in turn get paid.  Often times the affiliate runs a website that has a large readership and they figure their readers might be interested in the companies offer, all perfectly helpful for both the website owner and their visitors.

But when a scammer realizes you can get paid for every person that fills out a job application form, they tend to get creative.  The latest scam in affiliate link swaps looks like a perfectly legitimate job posting.  But when you click on to their website to fill out an application, suddenly you are not on a companies employment section, but are on a large national job board.  What you didn’t see was your browser passing an affiliate key to the site.

The site that seems to be gamed the most lately is beyond.com (they must have some loose affiliate guidelines).

These job board sites are usually legitimate though and at most the scam hurts the job seeker by giving their info to a bunch of head hunters and email lists.  But you’re definitely not making any headway in your job search.

TV Robot / Writing Samples

I call this one TV Robot because it seems that is the fake company name a lot of the scammers are using for this one.

The main target for this scam are recent grads and freelance writers.

The premise of this scam works on content generation.  Basically, in industries like search engine optimization, people are constantly looking to add good, well written, content on their site in the hopes of showing up on Google searches.  Freelance writers are pretty cheap, usually $15 for 750 words.  But many of these scammers are working for sites that need thousands of pages of content, or they could even be posing as a freelance writer on a site like elance.com.

The scam works by posting a job for writers.  Once you express interest you are asked to provide some writing samples.  The topics will be giving to you and you often have a time limit.  Once you turn in your work, that is the last time you hear from the scammer.

The best way to avoid this scam is to check out a company before you start giving out free work.  Many of these scammers find it difficult to create a physical office or credentials.

Pay to Play

This is a scam that has existed in the real world for a long time.  This scam would often take place in a big conference hall and would have beauty or self help products as the focus.  Often called pyramid schemes the business would rely on signing up new workers and each worker paying most of their profits back to the person who brought them in.

The worse part of the scam was the pay to play fee.  And this is where the system has materialized on the internet.  In order to “make thousands of dollars a month” you need the kit or start-up package.  This of course costs money.

Google Scam

This scam was rampant on the internet in the last few years, but seems to have been cornered onto Craigslist recently.

The scam basically explains that Google is paying people to put links on the internet or do some other mundane task.  Remember this is Google we are talking about; they have created cars that drive themselves, you can imagine they have other robots that take care of everything they need to do on the web.

Once again the catch in this scam is that you are asked to pay a minimal fee to get the start-up kit.  This fee can often be only a couple of dollars, for “shipping”.  But it is the credit card information that the scammers are really after.  Once they have this you will find an $80 reoccurring fee on your credit card bill each month that takes some serious effort to dispute.

If you have run into other scams on Craigslist please let us know in the comments.

Frankie EybsenFrankie Eybsen is the marketing manager for ResumeBucket.  Frankie has worked in marketing, web design and development, and SEO.  He maintains a large client list for both marketing jobs and production. You can send him an email at frankie@resumebucket.com.