Complaint Review: Gregory Moon/KNI Logistics

My husband had the exact same thing happen to him in July 2011. I am writing to warn others not to be thrown off by the names of the individuals involved or the company name. That will change and the only thing that will remain consistent is the general tactic, which consists of a long and involved recruitment process for an overseas logistics company with plans to expand their operations into the US.


ANATOMY OF A FRAUD

In my husbands case, there was also a man and a woman from HR who "recruited" for a supposed office they were planning to staff in Los Angeles. The salary was reasonable. The training materials consisted, ironically, of what is legal to ship, how to protect cargo shipments and ports, etc. I suspect they swiped the training material from a legit source because there werent even a lot of typos or grammatical mistakes to tip us off.

My husbands friend, who works in logistics, thought the company website and training offer was legit. I, too, looked up the info. on Google, with no apparent red flags. My husband, like the fellow who wrote the complaint here, underwent a psychological screening by phone, adding to the legitimate feel of the whole experience.

In my husband's case, first contact came through an email claiming that he had responded to a job ad and the information attached was to satisfy his inquiry. This was not entirely surprising because a lot of career websites allow employers and I
don't agree with this practice --- to post "company confidential" ads so you don't really know who you are shooting your resume off to. My husband may or may not have responded to an ad; they could have just as easily looked him up because his resume is searchable to employers. (Thats part of the problem, too --- the employers who access career websites dont have to prove they are employers at all!)

Everything seemed up-front and transparent. The phone numbers worked (right area codes for where they said they were), the emails worked. The people were professional. The first contact was an HR representative from New York and the second another HR employee in charge of special projects. Little did we know: The special project is a scam!

After reviewing this supposed job opportunity, the month-long training began. The materials were attached to emails that arrived Monday through Friday, with a once-weekly test. However, this training was interrupted three weeks in by a
bonus opportunity to help keep my husband busy and to give him improved odds against the competition, which was expected to be tough! The instructions consisted of asking my husband to take their bank account number and add it to his credit card for the purpose of using it to make a sizeable payment. He received detailed PDF instructions on how to do this online for every major US bank.

I feel the banks are ethically if not criminally complicit because the scam utilizes loopholes that they are well aware of (how can they not know?). The banks and local FBI offices do not care. If you contact your local FBI office they will immediately refer you elsewhere rather than hear you out --- as if this is an old and tired fraud.

Meanwhile, we do not even have the American media willing to shine a light on how sophisticated these scams have become! Couldnt the credit card issuers or the FBI internet crimes division at least mount a PSA campaign by placing warning
ads on major career websites, blogs and job fairs? Why not even so much as any media coverage to help consumers protect themselves? For all the above reasons, this reeks of either law enforcement or the major banks being overwhelmed or
complicit in the scam. Fortunately, my husband did not fall for this aspect of the scam but since the thieves have my husband's signature for the training program we don't know how they might use that bit of his identity to impersonate him or forge his signature on documents at a later date.

TIP: Ask your banks to place a fraud alert on your your credit cards if you feel someone has obtained your information and will use it to commit a crime.


FRAUD PROTECTION

The only real hope Americans have is to change the laws governing who is responsible to repay fraudulent bank transactions involving fake money orders, wire transfers and credit card transactions. Right now the onus is entirely on the consumer. You will be up a creek just like the fellow here reports with his KNI Logistics horror story. It's your word against that other party. The banking or law enforcement authorities might not take the time to look into who that other party is. Again, maybe there are just too many of them running scams to keep track of or maybe the banks stand to profit when consumers are victimized (given that the laws don't provide banks any incentive to care as long as somebody --- YOU --- pay).

In the long run, the laws need to change to facilitate a best practices or Safety in Employment Recruiting. Right now, its the Wild West when it comes to job hunting online. Anybody who pays a fee can go to a career website and view YOUR
resume. Thats particularly scary knowing that most job hunts involve some form or level of publicity of ones resume online, where it will remain indefinitely unless you remember to take every last one of them down (and they arent in an
internet cache).

My solution or constructive suggestion is this: It should be illegal for an employer to solicit for a job online if they are not willing to disclose their identity. That is because without an identity a consumer can submit his or her personally identifiable information (PII) to a potentially fake job posting. If it were not legal to leave that entry blank or to conceal the employer's name it could
cut down on the fraud perpetuated against job seekers. Next, there should be some kind of vetting process that requires employers who wish to post job ads to the web to be pre-screened with the idea being that an independent verification
has been conducted to vouch for them. An organization could be invented for the purpose of providing a look-up method, complete with a seal of approval to appear by the job description to indicate that it has been vetted.

In this way, job seekers can have some method or assurance that they are not providing their resume to a fictitious employer
(identity theft ring). However the problem is solved, it must start with Congress getting a handle on how pervasive the privacy invasions are online (of which you have little choice if you want to land a job). Sure, there are ways to protect your resume from going public on select sites but that will only cut down on the odds that legit offers will arrive at your attention, too. Not to mention, there are many employers who use sites like Craig's List and do not redirect you to their company website nor even want you to learn WHO they are and WHO is doing the hiring. The plain truth is, any time you email your resume off to someone you are at risk! This puts job seekers --- all of us at one time or another --- at risk of being contacted by a recruiter who has no other purpose but to commit a crime! There are some things that should have been left to paper, fax machines and the USPS.
Job hunting is one of them. However, none of this is going to change until people start pleading for their congress people and/or district attorneys to DO something about the vulnerability that current job search methods have imposed on job seekers.

 
BOTTOM LINE


If you are the victim of a similar logistics training program by another name, chances are, like my husband, the same people are behind it. They just mix up the company name and website to keep the complaints from catching up with them. If and when fraud complaints go public on sites like this, these scam artists are on notice to start up under new assumed company names and identities.

Rather than put the scam artists at an advantage by admitting to the world that youre on to them, I encourage victims and would-be recruits to FIRST report them confidentially to the IC3.GOV website, which will be relayed to law enforcement. If the phishers see public reports like this, all they will do is make up another name for another website. If, on the other hand, victims of these schemes file a report to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.GOV) website, there's at least a small chance that some of them will be caught, some day.