Scam – Paul's Tech Talk

Prevailing winds of Job Scams being on the Rise in 2024

PaulMay 14, 20241 Reply

Identifying Potential Job Scams

I recently got an email from a what looks to be from a Froelich-Engeerscarrer.com. I wanted to share with you how to identify that it is most likely just scam and not even replying to these types of emails.

Email that I received:

Hello Applicant,

I hope this email finds you in great health.Froelich Engineers, Inc,welcomes your application for the Remote IT Support Specialist position on LinkedIn. Your impressive qualifications and experience have attracted our curiosity, and we would like to invite you to an interview.

We believe you have the potential to be an essential member of our team, and we hope to learn more about you. As we discover more about you via the interview, you will have a better understanding of our organization.

If you choose to advance with the interview process, please respond to this email with a simple “YES”. We’ll contact you about the next stages.

We appreciate your interest in joining our team and look forward to hearing from you.

NB:If you receive this message before please ignore.However if didnt kindly respond

Best regards.

Thomas Trosten (thomastrosten@froelich-engineerscareer.com)

As you can see there are several red flags in the message because of not quite English. Here’s what I noticed of the bat with this email. ONLY asking you to reply with a YES instead of sending a calender invite to video chat. Also the spelling in the DIDNT and no spacing in the first paragraph between the period indicates this is a mail merge or some kind of email.

Investigating the company and Domain

When I get these types of emails and am curious to see if they may be real or not, the first place I go is looking up the domain they are supposedly sending from. Froelich-engineerscareer.com:

After checking with the domain tools website this was just created a few days ago. So that’s another good red flag but the real red flag is that on the main website. They say this on their careers page:

Scam or No Scam!

Being that they are using bad English and that I they aren’t using the right email address and even that domain they are sending from is just days old, I would have to assume this is a scam and that it isn’t real and that you shouldn’t trust anything they say if they contact you about a possible job. It’s more and more looking just like a big phishing or money scam that they are trying to do and you should avoid these types of email scams that might come your way.

Always check the company you are getting solicited from before you even consider taking the job. They are doing their own research on you and you should be able to do the same research back to see if they are real or just fake jobs trying to fool the many out their who might need a job. Don’t ever stop researching companies as you are applying for them.

Job Scams that seem too good to be true

PaulFebruary 28, 2024

Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

I received this Text

(270)900-7242

Hi, my name is Nyla Lucas and I am a Recruiter at Conill Advertising & Media.
Our company is looking for online part-time employees, job certification is easy and free
Can be done with any schedule you have, even on the weekends
Can I send you job details?

I can only guess what the purpose of this part-time job or Full Time Job is. After saying I would like more information this is what this number sent me. I won’t say this isn’t too original to say the least.

Requirements: Age 22 and above. We offer part-time ($80-300/hour) and full-time ($1800-3800/month) positions. All you need to do is help them optimize the hotel, increase occupancy rate, exposure and ranking, and attract more Many locals and tourists stay here. Flexible application options are available that can be adjusted to fit your schedule. No contract or investment is required; free training is also provided. Part-time and full-time flexible jobs available, with the option to work from home. If you’re interested, I’ll give you more information, okay?

If it’s Too good to be true?

Let me say this once and for all after this text, I started getting red flags everywhere. At the most I haven’t even could imagine making 80 to 300 dollars an hour. Let alone for a part time position and we are to optimize and increase occupancy rate, and even raking. How would that even work. So I went on the web and started to deep dive into this type of job. I however am sure it is just a scam but let’s first understand that they are trying to get me to use WhatsApp and draw me away from sending text messages. That’s my first question, the next questions is who is “Conill Advertising & Media” and why would they want to increase the revenue of these hotels. I found some more examples of this company on Reddit. I don’t know if this is just an AI putting in random people’s name or if they are real people. After deep diving into the name of the person who it claims to be, I am a bit concerned. Nyla Lucas which has a felony and ther such things on her record was the first person to show up in Google. Now let’s not go saying this Nyla Lucas is the same one but I suspect that if it was a different one then I wouldn’t be using that exact name while trying to recruit people. I went to the Reddit post and checked out other users name that claimed to be doing the same thing and I found these are high profile people, so I must conclude that most of these are people are just using these name to guile people into this scam. Either way, let me remind people if it is too good to be true, then any usually isn’t something you want.

Thanks to another Reddit Post, this does seem to be a scam. Please be careful and don’t fall for these types of scam, because you need your money to survive. If they ever require you to pay for something and promising to pay you back than that is another red flag and don’t accept anything that might be Crypto Currency such as USDT which one person from the Reddit Post comments is how they will pay you. I am not sure why people try these sort of things but I do know they aren’t going to get me on this type of scam. I usually ask a lot of questions about this and try to find my answer way before they can get any money from me. Remember the old scam I got years ago which came in as a check. That one I will never forget because it was truly one of those that almost got me until I read what they wanted me to do. I blog about this stuff so you don’t have to loose your money and get caught loosing money.

You are not being investigated, or is there suspicious activity on your account!

PaulMay 14, 2021

Keep getting scam Calls

Today alone I got two identical scam calls from a local number. The Automated message warned that I was under investigation because of suspicious activity on my account, and I should dial 1 to talk to a representative. I really need to record this message and write down this automated messages just because it is obviously a red flag right there. There seems to be a lot of people who don’t know anything about these types of scams but here is what I already know before I even dial 1 just to keep the scammer busy for a few more minutes. I’m going to talk about some of the ways you know that it is a scam.

They Prey on your Fears!

This one is quite obvious to me at least because they want you to give them money or make it seems you are going to be arrested because of a debt or even your tax information is out there. I am sure that my information is never truly going to be private and I’ve talked about it time and time again. So I have to believe that it will eventually leak and someone will try to do something to use it against me. I am hopeful by the time they do that I won’t be alive to even worry about it.

There is a warrant for you arrest!

This is another one that I’ve heard recently by the phone scammers, they like to use this one with debt scam and trying to scare you to pay a debt or maybe not even that just to scam you for money. Either way, if there was a warrant for your arrest then you’d have someone knocking on your door this instant. Also if this is in relation to a debt than it is against the law, the Fair Credit Debt Act prevents creditors from doing this such thing to get money from you.

Social Security Administration

This is another red flag for anyone who gets a call from them. This is an obvious scam because social security will never call you. If there is a problem they will send you mail through your mailbox and not from a phone call.

Phone Number

It usually is a local number and or number that isn’t being used. 9 times out of ten, if you had any call id information it will look like a local number calling you. Again, they like to spoof their number and keep you from know where they are truly calling from or the real number. So when I hang up with them, I call that number back and find out the number is no long in use.

Won’t give you any information

They will never give you any information about why they called you or where they are calling from, or even give you a real number to call to confirm that this is them. I even tried to ask for the exact address from where they are calling from, they just hung up. Also be wary even if they give you their federal employee number, that another way they will use to get you to either give them money or steal your identity.

Never Give them any Information

This one goes without saying, no matter what never give them any of your information including but not limited to you Social Security Number, Your Full name, where you life, you’re phone number or anything like that. If they say they are from the Social Security Administration office and you’re concerned please hang up and call your local Social Security office to find out if you have a problem. They will probably tell you it was a scam like I suspect.

*UPDATE*

As of July alone, I got several phone calls from Orlando Florida area code (407) claiming something similar like this:

(407)540-3718
(407)548-2738
(407)434-8822
(407)483-8647

Never Click links in unexpected Text messages!

PaulSeptember 26, 2020

Man Wearing Brown Suit Jacket Mocking on White Telephone By Moose Photos

Unexpected Text message

Today I got a really interesting text from (347)268-9158 and the Message contained:

Eamon, Urgent alert about the USPS shipment 5K24F6 from 7/17/2020. Click : sj1v.info/[hidden]

I’ve always believed that you should never click anything that you didn’t expect to receive. I was at work at the time so I decided to wait till I got home to try to figure out this out. I did my usually searched for the message on Google maybe someone else commented about this also. That came back with nothing. So my next option was to see if I could find out where this url was going to so I went to a URL expander such as CheckShortURL because I thought it might be a shortened URL. It couldn’t find out the expanded URL.

Deeper Look

I decided to check out this domain because I was curious about a url that didn’t look like a normal URL. So I did a WHOIS Lookup with Whois.net and I got this information about the domain:

You can see some very important information about this domain. For instances you can see when this was created which was a day ago. It seems kind of strange to create this domain a day ago. I have always said don’t click links.

Do not Click

I can’t express how much you should not click links that you didn’t ask for or from unknown numbers such as this. I have my thoughts that it tries to compromise your phone and get a virus or something in your phone. I serious doubt a new website would send me to a new site about an order that I supposedly did in June or July! If in doubt always GOOGLE the number or google the message to see what others might have to say about the message.