scam job emails in a depressed economy Hi, First off, I would like to say that for the past 5 years I have used for sales, discussions and of course job listings. In light of the economic depression I find it very saddening that some people are taking advantage of this time to send out obviously fake emails asking for upfront personal information and work-from-home or abroad offers. My recent experience has been that when applying to relatively unskilled jobs such as in the office /admin category I have received an excessive amount of emails that are badly formatted, and mention suspicious offers as well as asking for personal info. These emails tend to come from other gmail accounts with first and last names in the from field. It is my hope that the community can monitor and act against this effectively making the kind of open online community we all hope to achieve. Martin

lost cause. this practice has been on-going for years now on CL, and probably many other job-seeking sites. yes, office/admin is heavily targeted simply because it is the most trafficked by job-seekers. the problem has apparently become too big and costly to police, and it's not going away any time soon. too many suckers out there.

Scammers - Don't hold your breath for a change. Try to become an expert, like a lot of the rest of us who've been searching for a long time, at spotting the scammers by reading their ads carefully in the first place and not responding to them - or asking questions from a throwaway email without sending any personal info to them and seeing what you get in return. There are a lot of obvious signs that have been discussed here before. Some are: * Sounds too good to be true/unrealistic hourly wage or salary posted for the type of work to be done * Ad posted in the middle of the night.- Good indication they're in outer slobovia instead of your city. * Very generic responsibilities listed, no business name listed and no business email to respond to. Blind box only responses. * Business name listed, but no brick and mortar location in your city (always look at the Contact us and Locations sections). I've seen several advertised in the U.S. that only had Canadian locations, for example. * Often only or gmail.com addresses Good luck navigating the mine field.