Making Lemonade

What I learned while narrowly avoiding an employment scam.

Making Lemonade

What I learned while narrowly avoiding an employment scam.

One thing I have always told myself about life, even back when I was a pessimistic teenager, was, ”If I learned from it, then I can’t regret it.”

That motto has helped spare me from a lifetime of regrets, including this most recent one.

The Situation

After being downsized from my incredible job at Hive Learning, I found myself back to the old grind of finding job postings, tailoring my resume and cover letter to fit each one, and applying. I’ve been going through 5-8 applications per week.

As the primary income earner in my household, I definitely have a sense of urgency when looking for work. The sooner I can find gainful employment again, the sooner I can breathe easily and sleep peacefully.

So when a potential employer responded to an application about two days after I submitted it, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised. That must have been record time.

First Contact

A recruiter reached out to me via email to find out if I was still interested in a copywriter position I applied for. Naturally, I responded that I was.

They followed up the same day with a Word document that included the job description and a list of 14 interview questions. I was asked to write my responses and respond “promptly.” That was on a Friday.

There were a lot of questions, and because I was applying for a writing position and treating this like my sample writing assignment, I was certain to be thorough. I practiced the STAR technique with each of my responses:

Situation: What was the set-up for the answer to the question?

Task: What was I supposed to do about it?

Action: What action did I take to handle the situation?

Result: What happened as a result of my action?

It’s a common interview technique, but I had never applied it in written format before. Still, I wanted to be thorough and impressive, so I stuck to it.

I spent six hours on a Friday night responding to these questions. Well, on a Friday night and into the wee hours of Saturday morning, because I wasn’t done until around 2 a.m.

Overall, I wrote about 20 pages of text in response to these 14 questions. Maybe it was too much.

I waited until later the next day to send my responses, because I didn’t want it to look like I was up working on this until the early hours. Wouldn’t that set a bad precedent?

The Response

I didn’t expect to hear anything Sunday, Monday, or even Tuesday the next week. After all, it was a lot to read through.

Yet on Tuesday, I got another email. I was expecting to receive a request for a phone or video interview to move me to the next stage of the process.

Imagine my utter shock when the recruiter said they wanted to offer me the job. It was exciting, but I also felt uncomfortable about it. They hadn’t even spoken with me as a live human being yet.

There were a few other red flags, too. They used phrases like “We’d like to get you set up quickly,” and “respond promptly so we can get you going.”

Scammers almost always evoke a sense of urgency.

They wanted me to send my name and contact info to Human Resources via email so they can send my official offer letter. They weren’t asking for any sensitive information, and nothing they didn’t already have based on my application, so part of me wanted to still believe that this was all legitimate.

More Red Flags

As requested, I sent my contact info to HR@TheEmailAddressTheyGave.com. I expected to hear something back within a day or two.

Within hours, I received a response with a “Welcome to the team” email and an attached offer letter.

The offer letter seemed pretty legit. The terms of employment were common, and they didn’t ask me for anything unusual. I just had to sign it and return it to get the ball rolling.

But here’s the thing that really made my hair stand on end. If you know me, that’s quite a feat because my hair is long enough to run all the way down my back.

They laid out how I was to go about getting my work from home tech set up. They were going to mail me a check, which I was to deposit and then use to buy one of two tech packages (a Mac or a Dell laptop) from their vendor.

I wondered why on earth they wouldn’t just mail me the selection and expense it on their end. After all, that’s what my last remote job did. It felt off to me.

All the red flags added up enough for me for to start investigating the company.

Before I explain my research, let’s go over all the big red flags.

· I received an email within days after the initial application. That alone would just be a nice thing to receive, but in the context of everything else it’s a red flag.

· The urgency to “respond promptly” and “get things set up so you can start training right away” felt like another red flag.

· Receiving a job offer without ever speaking to a live human was another red flag. Really, really red. Like, vermillion or crimson or something.

· I didn’t mention this before, but the job listing on LinkedIn said the position started at $78,000 per year. The offer letter said $50/hours, which is equal to $104k. That’s a huge disparity.

· Being asked to deposit a check and then buy from a vendor was weird. Really, really weird.

· The offer letter was signed by the CEO. What CEO signs their offer letters?

· Then I investigated deeper.

I looked up the company online again. I had already done this when writing my interview responses, but I wanted to be sure things seemed legit.

I read reviews about them on Glassdoor. There were over 70 reviews dating back a few years. That was encouraging, because it meant they had longevity.

However, the reviews were an average of 2.9 stars. Most people talked about their remote work being a perk, but that the company culture was poor and the work load was too demanding.

On its own, that didn’t entirely seem off-putting to me. I thought “Well, it seems like a low quality employer, but not a scam.”

Until I started comparing domain names from the company and from the emails I received.

Checking the Domains

I’ve been careful to avoid giving the name of the company so far, because ultimately I decided this was a scam and that the company in question isn’t at fault. I believe someone was impersonating a low-quality employer to make it feel legitimate. I don’t want to drag the employer through the mud in case they are innocent.

So I’m going to use fake domain names to illustrate this point.

I’ve had a lot of experience with online security and anti-phishing training, and I know it’s important to check the URL of any link or email address that seems supcsuspicious.

The email address of the recruiter and HR department was something like: Name@EmployerCareers.com.

However, when I searched for the employer independently on Bing, I found their job site to be something like

https://careers.employer.com

.

There’s an obvious discrepancy there.

I tried plugging EmployerCareers.com into my address bar to see if it rerouted to the company’s job portal. Instead, it went to one of those domain parking websites, such as “This domain is owned by GoDaddy.”

It was as if someone purchased the domain, but they didn’t even bother to build a website. It was just a burner domain.

Finally, the Scam

There were lots of red flags adding up now. I turned to Microsoft Copilot to ask it a few questions and dig a little deeper.

Eventually, Copilot helped me surface some Reddit and FTC articles about this very type of scam.

· An employer, or anyone else for that matter, says they’ll send you a check to buy something.

· You deposit the check into your bank account and buy the thing.

· The entity asks you to return whatever money was left over. You send that money from your bank account.

· The things you bought never arrive.

· The check you deposited is later found to be fraudulent. Your bank red flags your account and charges you a returned check fee, and possibly even shuts you down.

· Meanwhile, you’re out whatever money you sent the scammer.

Not good.

The Result

In the end, that offer letter is where I chose to leave it. I didn’t respond to them, and I’m not going to.

This was after many hours of research, writing, digging, and hoping beyond hope that it was real. Imagine what a person could do with $104k per year, even if they don’t love their job.

Especially if that person had recently been laid off and was hoping to find work quickly.

It could have been easy to get sucked into the trap. Because of the sunk cost fallacy, the idea that I spent so much time on my written interview that I had to at least follow through, I probably got further along in that scam process than I should have.

Thankfully though, I went with my gut. I paid attention to the warning signs and did my due diligence to avoid what could have been a serious issue.

Then I resolved to keep on keepin’ on with the job hunt.

The Lemonade

I was talking to my wife about this. She was just as bummed as I was, because she also feels the pressure of me being out of work. But her first response was “Well, at least you learned a lot while responding to those questions.”

You know what? I did. As my friend and former manager Zoe pointed out, looking at that bright side was a way to make lemonade from lemons, to paraphrase the old adage.

I think the interview questions were probably written by AI. They were just the sort of things that a person applying for a copywriter position might expect to respond to. That’s what made things feel so real at first.

I spent six hours thinking about my work history, how I can and have applied it in different situations, and how I can flex my transferable skills into many different types of work.

In the end, I spent six hours getting to know myself and my work a lot better than I would have. It was good prep for future interviews.

This whole experience really embodies the idea of Growth for ALL.

· Accessibility: Because I’ve had access to online security and anti-phishing training in the past, I knew what to look out for and was adept at spotting red flags. Even though my brain sometimes told me to keep pushing through, my gut kept telling me to be wary.

· Learning: I learned a lot about trusting my instincts. I also learned how I have and can continue to flex my work experience. Because I learned something, I don’t regret the time I spent on this.

· Leadership: My wife reminded me that I could take a learning opportunity out of this ordeal. That was a show of leadership that helped me step back from myself and evaluate the situation more critically.

There are two big takeaways from this:

First, stay alert for online scams wherever you are. Even LinkedIn isn’t immune to them. If something feels like it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Second, always look for the lesson in every hardship. If you can learn from it, you don’t need to regret it. But honestly, I wish you luck in not having to learn the hard way, just like I narrowly did this time.

That’s it for now. Until next time, I wish you luck on your journeys.