Logistics-ICS

Logistics-ICS Catherine Hoff, HR, New York, NY Office Job Seekers Beware: Overseas Logistics Company Provides Sophisticated Online Training Program; T

15th of Jul, 2011 by User197900

Job hunters need to be aware that after posting a resume online you may be contacted for an unusually elaborate scheme to defraud your credit card. Except you won't know that your credit card will play any role whatsoever in the job until you are already knee deep in training for the position. Here's how the pitch works: The company is European or some such offshore location and they are expanding into the US. After several weeks of online training you are going to undergo an interview. The scam is so elaborate that they will even have an HR person talk to you, provide a detailed job description, FAQ, etc. A company psychologists may even contact you for a screening. The training session is paid (or so they promise), the tests are open book. The salary for the position you will have after you land the job is within reason. None of the usual too-good-to-be-true tip-offs are present. You will receive daily emails with study materials in PDF or MS Word. After a week or two of this you will be told about a special project (PO) that will allow you to improve your competitive edge against other contenders in your area. The PO will consist of taking down a Wells Fargo or similar bank account, which you add to your online credit card to pay down your charge card balance. The amount will be several thousand dollars. They will warn you that the payment will not go through if the amount you owe is less than the one they want to credit (and how they know that you owe enough to accept such a credit presents another level of mystery and probable identity theft). The instructions on how to add the account number will arrive in a very slick "manual" with Chase, AMEX and all the major credit card issuers being listed with step-by-step instructions. After accepting the charge card payment --- assuming you get paid at all --- you are asked to go out and purchase computers or electronics you buy out of the US and ship them to a foreign destination. You are not asked to use their (fake) logistics company to deliver the packages but the US Express Mail. In the case here, the destination was the Ukraine and the computers were Macs. If you refuse to proceed with the special project, as I did, the study materials will abruptly stop. The usual red flags were not overt. For instance, the WHOIS record for the website dated back to 2002. Usually the scam websites come and go to evade the authorities --- or one would think. You might also think that when a company is running a scam you can Google the company name and the word "scam" or "fraud" and have other complaints come up to tip you off before you get suckered in. Well, I have news for you: This company did not come up in an internet search with any negative reports attached to it. Furthermore, I have a friend who works in logistics and yet there were no really obvious typos or grammar mistakes to suggest that the job or the website were fake. And get this: The training materials are legit. They will talk about port security (example: the Anti-Terrorism Joint Task Force), ask you to memorize terms and regulations, learn what is legal and not legal to ship by cargo vessel, etc. They will have the company logo on the study materials it will LOOK above board. I have found near identical reports using the same tactics as described above except for the change of company name (always logistics related). I am guessing that the websites are different for each potential victim. That way, when you find out you were the object of a scam you go out looking and still there isn't anything bad to be found before or after the fact. They probably use the company name or website once and then use a new variant on the next person so the name is always fresh and can't help you when you enter it into a search engine. The only way to avoid this trap is to avoid ALL unsolicited emails or phone calls for a logistics career involving an overseas operator attempting to set up offices in the US. The one thing I could have done differently was to enter a reference in my internet search to the fact that this particular fraud involves training. If you are contacted about a job in the shipping, freight or cargo industry, do a less specific search for the term "logistics" and the word "training" together. This MIGHT pull up a list of other companies that used the identical method to deceive desperate job seekers. If those methods look identical or similar to what you have been told about by a supposed recruiter, report the fraud to the IC3.gov (Internet Complaint Crime Center). Remember that you are on the hook for bad money orders, wire transfers or credit card payments. Under no circumstance agree to reship equipment. Not all countries can receive all electronics that we in the US can freely purchase. Apple is one of the brands they are looking for but it might also involve phones and other types of high-tech gadgets. Until the laws are changed to take consumers off the hook for the fact that they were victimized, too, the banks have little incentive to fix the problem as long as somebody pays the bill. They know that somebody will pay --- you --- and they don't have time to track down the bad guys because there are just too many of them. (Check out the Reader's Digest article in Spring 2011 that talked about an entire Romanian city that internet crime built --- that's how entrenched these phishing schemes really are). Before tipping your criminal stalker off to the fact that you are wise to his or her scheme, I encourage people to file a formal complaint with your congressional representative or the FBI (if you call your local FBI office they will refer you to the IC3.GOV website). By contrast, if you file on RipOffReport you will warn other consumers but law enforcement may not get wind of it until a bunch of other people have been ripped off and/or the scam picks up and relocates. Collect the evidence. Report it. Then warn other people not to fall for it (at least until the "company" gets wise to the idea and changes names yet again). From what I can tell, this is most likely a combination of money laundering and identity theft, undoubtedly perpetuated by an organized crime syndicate (probably Russian). They will fool you with how transparent they are --- providing websites, job descriptions, pages of emails to assuage your concerns, even phone numbers. And, too, they will let you talk to company employees who do not have Russian accents (in my case, English and British). In this case, the perps even advertised their corporate contact information in Denmark, the UK, New York and elsewhere. I happened to miss the fact that while the addresses were legitimate, none of them included a suite or unit number as would be expected of a business that occupies an office in the US or Europe. What you really get when you look up the address and zip code is the entire STREET and not the specific business. When it comes to the phone numbers, they will have all the right area codes to mislead you. However, they are using VoIP technology, meaning they can make their phone number look like it is coming from the US when really it is routed over the internet from who-knows-where. My take-away is that you can't always rely on an established website with a longstanding WHOIS record or even your own due diligence in researching the company name or job title. The perps are smart: They rarely use any one pseudo company name in conjunction with the scam enough times that the reports will surface right there at the top of the page when you Google them. They'll use the same scam but different names, email addresses and phone numbers --- knowing that the first thing you'll do is Google their name, which is fake and won't track back to anything but their equally misleading website. This is a nearly identical fraud, perpetuated by a man and a woman. This is 98 percent similar to my own experience, right down to the fact that both a man and a woman contacted me with a job opportunity that entailed weeks-long paid training: KNI Logistics http://www.ripoffreport.com/employers/gregory-moon-kni-log/gregory-moon-kni-logistics-nat-29ed3.htm In my case, the suspects aren't named Gregory Moon or Natalie Williams but Catherine Hoff and James A. Palmer. These names, as you've noticed, are so generic that they probably aren't their real names at all. Oh, and when I looked up the company headquarters in Copenhagen, I also found that the address corresponded to a business building that specializes in providing turnkey secretaries, fax lines, email and the forwarding of mail to a destination of the client's choosing. In other words, a drop-box connected to a rent-an-office, rent-a-staff operation. In closing, I can't emphasize enough how elaborate this fraud is. There will be legitimate materials, plenty of transparency, phone and emails that work, established website presences and, in the end, the solicitation of a special assignment or project that is the REAL intent of the operation --- but not until you've wasted weeks away from your job search dutifully studying for your weekly tests. That's what makes this particular scam particularly egregious. It's time the authorities put some investigative resources behind this scam because it isn't your ordinary too-good-to-be-true employment solicitation.

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