Hi Friends,
In one of my previous blogs I mentioned about "How do recruiters fool the freshers". I had posted about a fake offer letter that I received which claimed that I had got a job in Bajaj Auto Ltd. I had provided you some tips and tricks to recognize a fake offer letter in that blog.
Recently I read somewhere that the target audience for such mails are those who have posted their CVs on various job portals like naukri.com, monster.com, headhonchos.com, shine.com, timesjob.com etc. Out of the total recipients of such fraudulent mails 98% are those who's CVs have been posted on any one of the above job portals. So in case if you are registered on any of these sites, then you will surely receive these kind of offer letters.
A few days back, one of my friend received a similar type of offer letter. Lets analyse this letter and find out how did we came to know that this letter was a fake one. Below is the copy of the letter which my friend received:
On going through the letter carefully, I found that these people required the candidates to pay money through any of the 3 banks mentioned. The biggest hindrance in transferring the money was, that no bank account number was mentioned in the letter to whom the money shall be transferred. This was a clear cut indication that something was wrong. Remember none of the recruiters require any deposit of money from the candidates. So whenever you receive an offer letter mentioning the payment of some money in return of an interview, DO NOT entertain such mails. Delete this mails no matter howsoever appealing the offer maybe.
Further if one can see, the whole of the offer letter is colourful. It uses through colours, Red, Blue and Black. In a corporate communication such colourful letters are never send. Only black is a permitted font colour in all the corporates. All the official documents including the offer letters and the appointment letters are always printed in black fonts.
Nowadays these kinds of letter are circulated to thousands of people and so people are slowly and gradually becoming aware of the tricks played by these fraudsters. Therefore, the fraudsters have also become some what intelligent. In order to portray themselves as genuine recruiters and to win the trust of people, they added the reasons of asking for a security deposit. This was a new thing that I came across. The spammers took enough care to justify their act of asking for a security deposit.
Even though the spammers, tried hard to make this letter authentic by using a letter head and logo of the company, using the reference no. of the jobs and mentioning the reasons for asking the security deposit, they made two funny mistakes in this letter.
The first mistake was that they mentioned about the air tickets to be sent to the candidates on the receiving the amount of security deposit. Everyone should here consider the fact that none of the recruiters make any of the travel arrangement for the candidates. The candidates have to arrange on their own for the travel and the same can be claimed under relocation bonus once the candidate gets selected. The provision of air tickets to the candidates on receipt of the security deposit was a big mistake of the spammer.
The second mistake was the funniest one which I have seen in any of the offer letters/call letters. This call letter was signed by the CEO and MD of Maruti Suzuki and even his number was mentioned in the letter. If we use a little bit of common sense we shall come to know that a person who is a CEO or MD doesn't even care for hiring people below certain levels in an organisation. Recruiting people out of the Board of Directors is out of the purview of the CEO & MD and he is least bothered in all these stuffs and he would never allow his cellphone number to go public, else people will start harassing him. This was the funniest part of the letter.
I went a little bit further to call on the number mentioned in the letter and there I found that such number didn't exist. After this I googled out the domain name used in the sending the mail and to my surprise I found the following result one of the sites:
In one of my previous blogs I mentioned about "How do recruiters fool the freshers". I had posted about a fake offer letter that I received which claimed that I had got a job in Bajaj Auto Ltd. I had provided you some tips and tricks to recognize a fake offer letter in that blog.
Recently I read somewhere that the target audience for such mails are those who have posted their CVs on various job portals like naukri.com, monster.com, headhonchos.com, shine.com, timesjob.com etc. Out of the total recipients of such fraudulent mails 98% are those who's CVs have been posted on any one of the above job portals. So in case if you are registered on any of these sites, then you will surely receive these kind of offer letters.
A few days back, one of my friend received a similar type of offer letter. Lets analyse this letter and find out how did we came to know that this letter was a fake one. Below is the copy of the letter which my friend received:
At a first glance this letter looks as if it has been directly sent by Maruti Suzuki. But in reality this has been sent by the same spammers, who send you the mails for winning lotteries.
Lets first see the mail id from which the mail was sent.
As you all can see the mail was sent from a strange mail id wed_msi@libero.it. Looking at this mail id I found something fishy. As I have discussed in my earlier blog, that the corporate companies always use their corporate domains to send mails. So this was the first sign of this letter being sent by a fraudster.
Thereafter my friend informed that she had never applied for this kind of a job, inspite of this she received this offer letter. This was the second sign of the letter being fake. This happened just like those spam lottery mails where you win the lottery grand prize even without purchasing a lottery ticket.
Further if one can see, the whole of the offer letter is colourful. It uses through colours, Red, Blue and Black. In a corporate communication such colourful letters are never send. Only black is a permitted font colour in all the corporates. All the official documents including the offer letters and the appointment letters are always printed in black fonts.
Nowadays these kinds of letter are circulated to thousands of people and so people are slowly and gradually becoming aware of the tricks played by these fraudsters. Therefore, the fraudsters have also become some what intelligent. In order to portray themselves as genuine recruiters and to win the trust of people, they added the reasons of asking for a security deposit. This was a new thing that I came across. The spammers took enough care to justify their act of asking for a security deposit.
Even though the spammers, tried hard to make this letter authentic by using a letter head and logo of the company, using the reference no. of the jobs and mentioning the reasons for asking the security deposit, they made two funny mistakes in this letter.
The first mistake was that they mentioned about the air tickets to be sent to the candidates on the receiving the amount of security deposit. Everyone should here consider the fact that none of the recruiters make any of the travel arrangement for the candidates. The candidates have to arrange on their own for the travel and the same can be claimed under relocation bonus once the candidate gets selected. The provision of air tickets to the candidates on receipt of the security deposit was a big mistake of the spammer.
The second mistake was the funniest one which I have seen in any of the offer letters/call letters. This call letter was signed by the CEO and MD of Maruti Suzuki and even his number was mentioned in the letter. If we use a little bit of common sense we shall come to know that a person who is a CEO or MD doesn't even care for hiring people below certain levels in an organisation. Recruiting people out of the Board of Directors is out of the purview of the CEO & MD and he is least bothered in all these stuffs and he would never allow his cellphone number to go public, else people will start harassing him. This was the funniest part of the letter.
I went a little bit further to call on the number mentioned in the letter and there I found that such number didn't exist. After this I googled out the domain name used in the sending the mail and to my surprise I found the following result one of the sites:
The domain name libero.it was a part of the fake spam mails that were being regularly sent by the people of Nigeria, South Africa etc. This further confirmed my suspicion of this letter being a fake one.
I hope friends you all will now be able to identify such letters sent by the spammers easily.
Remember, whenever someone asks you to pay money over the internet, do not do so without verifying the identity of the person or else you will land yourself in a great trouble.
In case if any of you receive such kind of letters delete it quickly to stop spammers mailing you again.
I hope this blog will be useful to you. Please fell free to comment over here. You can provide me a feedback on this article by commenting over here or mailing me on snehal.sukhadia@gmail.com In case if you have any queries fell free to mail me and I will be happy to help you.
All the best for the campus interviews.
Bbye...!!!!
