I submitted my CV for a job offer on Gumtree. It was to work in a residential home for the elderly, and I should have seen then that it was fishy because I live really close to the location but I had never noticed a residence in there (I usually keep an eye out for places I can apply for a job). I got a call merely one or two days later, for a sort of phone interview. At that moment I felt there was something fishy going on, because the guy (his name was Frank Alistair Collins ) didn't seem interested in knowing about me, he kept interrupting me to get to the point, which was: I needed CPR and handling training, and he wanted to know whether I had the money to afford it. Now obviously, when working with certain clients, you do need that, but a real company, if they are interested in you as a worker, will pay for it. At the moment I'm working for an agency that has payed for all the training for the workers, not only basic one but also for more specific subjects. So that didn't seem right to me. I asked if I could call later because I wanted to check that was somewhat standard in the business. The guy was very convincing, but I said I'd call later anyway (he was also very interested in doing everything really quickly, even though I said I was going to leave the country for some weeks in a few days; he wanted me to do the training before that and then have the job interview after my holiday).
So I checked, and obviously I found out this is a common scam, but I decided to look into the company. This is what I found:
-They are a really young company. Three months old.
-Registered in a building with loads of other companys in, which obviously means there is nothing in there except for mail boxes and similar services so that companies can give central London addresses.
-They don't exist on the internet. If you google them, you don't get their website (that I found on an email they send me). I couldn't find any comment from anyone in them. They are registered as a company, but the information you can find on websites that list companies is pretty basic.
-The name of the director, according to some websites about companies, is Frank Alistair Collins and Cassie Sercombe Collins. There is a similar company, already disolved, that had a "Cassie Collins" as a director. The company disolved the same month that Sercombe Collins Recruitment Ltd started, its name was Uniqcare Recruitment Ltd.