ABU DHABI Have you got a job offer that seems too good to be true? Have your prospective employers also asked to pay a fee to get your papers processed? Beware, it could be a scam.
Lately scores of Abu Dhabi residents have received appointment letters offering several times their current pay plus outlandish perks. The only catch is that they would have to pay “government and immigration charges” to a “travel agency” to procure their visas.
Last week XPRESS exposed how conmen set up a fake school website to lure unsuspecting jobseekers. Aspiring teachers were asked to pay thousands of dirhams to a bogus travel agency to secure their jobs. A variant of the same ruse is now being used to target professionals in other fields.
Indian John Azaph, 37, says he almost fell for one such offer had it not been for his timely research on the company offering to employ him. “At first glance, I thought I had finally made it big for the kind of package they seemed to be offering but I got the warning signs immediately when I couldn’t find the company anywhere online,” says Azaph. On May 4, he received a letter of appointment from a firm claiming to be an Abu Dhabi company by the name of Emirates Model Academy.
Pay a fee
Typical of a job scam XPRESS widely reported on in the past, Azaph was offered nearly half a million dirhams annually (Dh38,724 per month) for the role of an accountant. All the commerce graduate had asked for - in a separate questionnaire - was Dh10,000, a marginal hike from what he was earning in his previous job in an African country.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes going through the pay package and other perks, but the moment I realised I had to pay a fee to get my visa, I knew it was a ploy, one that’s been used quite often in the past,” adds the long-time Abu Dhabi resident. He says he was certain it was a scam when he received a separate email, instructing him to contact their travel agents, Gulf Coast Travels to pay $1,450 (Dh5,326) in visa charges. “The mail promised that expenses incurred shall be refunded after five working days of concluding all immigration processes, but we all know that never happens,” says Azaph.
XPRESS found out that Gulf Coast Travels operates with different Abu Dhabi addresses – all possibly fictitious – in order to target professionals in various categories. To make their demand for visa processing fees sound credible, they even go as far as saying that this policy is in line with the Expatriate Statuary Law of the UAE in compliance with the UN Terrorism Act. According to the UAE Labour Law it is illegal to charge candidates for jobs.
“They leave no stone unturned to sound genuine, but then a real employer will never ask for money and I somehow knew that to call their bluff,” says Lebanese Michael, who also received a similar job offer from a premier oil and gas company asking him to pay the same amount in visa processing fees to the same firm.
Not right
“I almost ended up paying them, but on second thoughts something somewhere just didn’t seem right,” said Doha-based Indian IT executive Syed Masood Agha, who last year received a similar appointment letter from Takreer, another name for Abu Dhabi Oil Refining Company - one of 16 subsidiary companies of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) operating in the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.
Seeing a spurt in fake offers in their name, Adnoc has issued public advisories against fraudsters offering fictitious jobs through e-mails. One of the public notices the company issued warned: “The forged job offers ask the victim to remit cash money to cover the work permit, visa application and recruitment fees.”
The scammers in the past trapped hospitals in their web of deceit, using their fake letterheads to send out appointment letters with more or less the same wordings and figures.
Unfortunately I lost my job because of a fake job offer,” said a distraught doctor from Pakistan who fell prey to the conmen’s job offer at a Dubai hospital last year. “Take serious action against them so after that they are not able to play with the emotions of people like us.”
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