Complaint Review: Transatlantic Shipping

My resume is posted on several job boards, Career Builder, Monster, etc.  I received an email for a job offer to support a newly expanding shipping company as a Project Manager position that offers $90k annual salary and minumim $2k training bonus...more if you do well in training and take on additional projcets.

The company doesn't request any information outside of name, mailing address, phone number and date of birth.  They even send a preemployment package and training material.  Training material is delievred every morning with a test on Friday that is due back to them the following week Monday.

I decided to play along to see how the scam worked and here's what I found:

The website had everal locations and several pages.  However after researching the locations they were either addresses to Office Suite locations or the food court of shopping malls.  The phone numbers were active but never answered.  The web site had several pages byt they were littered with gramatical errors and not a lot of work was put into the depth of the content.

Studies arrived the first and second week every morning.  The third week the studies arrived all at once at the beginning of the week.  Also on the third week an email came in from Anthony stating they "may" have a short term opportunity to make some quick money on a project and that participating in the project would greatly enhance the decision to hire me permanently.  Of course I would play along so I volunteered for the project.  Here is what the project was:  Help out the purchasing department with office expansions by researching, negotiating, and making purchase of office equipment.  The equipment would be shipped to a different address (never disclosed the shipping address).  Because it was a quick project there wasn't time to get a company credit card established so they offered to send a check to pay off the current balance of my credit card and I would make purchases up to the amount of the check they sent.

Obviously I did not accept the conditions and once I requested Anthony's credit card to make the purchases communication ceased.  As of October 24, 2016, the website appears to have been pulled down.  Further research reflected that the web page was just created July 12, 2016 and was based in the Ukraine.

The way the scam works is that they lure you into cedibility by providing what appears to be a valid company with a website and multiple international locations.  The "project" worked by sending a check for an amount in excess of $3,000 to your credit card with the impression that your balance would be credited with the amount.  The problem is that it takes 3 to 5 days for the credit card company to clear the check.  By then the one week project would have ended.  You would have purchased office equipment and shipped it to some unknown address only to find out that the original check was fradulent.

There are similar "Shipping" scams that will use stoeln credit card numbers.  They all have purchases made and shipped to another address or may even ship items to your address to be inspected, repackaged and sent to a third address.

In both scams you are the only one that authorities would catch up with while the products purchased would be lost.

Avoid Transatlantic Shipping Lines or any other similarly fashioned operation.  Rememebr, if it sounds too good to be true them it's a scam.