Woman warns people after almost falling for a job scam

Dubai:

A Dubai resident, who was almost duped into accepting a fake job offer in the United Kingdom has warned jobseekers to be extra cautious. especially if the offer is too good to be true.

Dinah D., who worked as an administrative officer in Dubai for 10 years before losing her job, said she was delighted to find a vacancy for a personal assistant in a UK-based construction company advertised in a Dubai-based online portal late December.

“I felt pleasantly surprised that a UK company would advertise on a local site. I never doubted the ad,” Dinah told Gulf News.

Dinah emailed her curriculum vitae to the published corporate email address and they replied within three days, saying she had been shortlisted.

Dinah said the HR manager in the email said the company would provide “free resident visa, UK flight ticket, furnished accommodation, transportation and medical insurance as per social security for successful applicants”.

To be eligible for a Skype interview, however, Dinah has to send her scanned attested educational and professional certificates first and other documents such as her passport copy and answer a general question for candidates first.

The email reply to Dinah further stressed: “Again!!! Please bear in mind non-compliance with the given requirements and not attaching the aforementioned certificates with your interview answers will have your application in our office revoked and cancelled.”

When Dinah was ready to send the requirements, she had a hunch that the job offer could be fake. She googled the company website and noticed that the “projects” of the construction company were photoshopped drawings that could not be independently verified. She keyed in the published phone number and it appeared in a scammer’s alert forum where UAE residents also posted having been duped using the same modus operandi. Others were asked to send money.

“I felt disgusted because they made it really believable,” Dinah said. “But I’m still lucky that I found out that it was a scam earlier on and did not reach the part when they would ask me to send money.”

Doing your own background check on prospective employers before pursuing a job posting is crucial to landing a good job, Samantha S., a senior consultant at Robert Murray and Associates, an international recruitment services, said.

“Doing your research is the first step forward. You have to take a lot of precautions because you would not want to leak out any identification to a stranger,” Samantha told Gulf News.

Samantha also said companies would rarely hire talent from overseas unless the position can’t be filled locally.

“[The position of a PA] is not a technical position that an international company will have to recruit from here. Why would they need candidates from here when they can easily hire from there without spending too much?”

International companies would also use professional platforms when recruiting.

“If the position is based in the UK, 99 per cent of the time, they wouldn’t hire directly. Most of the time they would go through a process, go through recruitment agencies like us because they wouldn’t spend just like that nor would the HR have so much of time that they could get in touch with each and every candidate,” Samantha said.