Abu Dhabi: If you have just been offered a job in the UAE out of the blue with pay several times your current salary and hefty perks, think twice before accepting it.
Chances are you could end up an unsuspecting victim of a scam where jobseekers are being lured with ‘genuine rubber-stamped’ offer-letters.
Qatar-based Syed Masood Agha, 35, said he nearly fell for the racket when he got one such ‘job offer’ from Abu Dhabi.
“I am registered on a job site and it [offer] came through them but something somewhere just didn’t seem right,” Agha told XPRESS over the phone from Doha.
Agha received an offer for the post of “asst. IT Supports’ from a company claiming to be Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company. He was offered a monthly salary of Dh 37,650.81 ($10,250) plus a weekly pocket allowance of Dh 1,836.50 ($500.00). Further benefits included allowances for car maintenance, entertainment and recreation, travel and events all to the tune of another $2,550 per month.
Beyond expectations
Agha says he had mentioned only $3,500 as his expected salary in a questionnaire for a ‘online job application interview. “No company would pay such kind of salary to a person who is at the stage of his career that I was in. That rang an alarm bell in my head,” he said. Agha works as a LAN administrator at an Athens-based oil and gas company in Doha earning around 7,000 Qatari Riyals (Dh7,060) a month.
That wasn’t all. The ‘offer letter’ included perks like travel and medical insurance, family accommodation in a ‘three bedroom duplex villa’, free education for children ‘home or abroad’ and a brand new car. “I thought words like these were provocative and certainly didn’t appear professional,” he said.
Agha was even asked to review the ‘offer’ and send back a scanned copy of the acceptance page which is when he uncovered the ‘hitch’.
The offer on a Takreer letterhead, a copy of which is with XPRESS, mentioned Agha was required to contact the designated ‘Traveling Agency’ for acquisition of work/residence permit papers.
It clearly said though that as a company policy, all non-UAE resident employees must bear the financial responsibilities for their work permit processing fees. To make it sound credible, they said it was in line with the ‘Expatriate Statuary Law of UAE in compliance with the U.N. Terrorism Act’.
Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company also known as Takreer is one of 16 subsidiary companies of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) operating in oil, gas and petrochemical industry as well as crude oil and gas transport and services.
Adnoc had recently cautioned jobseekers in the UAE and abroad about fraudsters offering fictitious jobs usually through e-mails. In a public notice, the company was quoted as saying: “The forged job offers ask the victim to remit cash money to cover the work permit, visa application and recruitment fees.”
Calls to the etisalat mobile number provided on the fake letter head went unanswered.
XPRESS has reported extensively on recruitment scams in the past, cautioning job-seekers against the tactics used by bogus placement companies.
According to the UAE Labour Law, it’s is illegal to charge candidates for jobs.
You Speak
Have you fallen for a job scam in the UAE? Tell us about your experience
Write to us at:
news@xpress4me.com
sms 5101
