Anatomy of a scam

DUBAI: From afar it appears as a huge success story out of India. Barely eight years into business, Wisdom Jobs is now regarded as a one-stop shop for job hunters with 30 million registered users and placement listings from all over the world.

The company’s CEO and founder Ajay Kolla is routinely hailed as a role model for young entrepreneurs. Sometime back, leading financial daily, Economic Times, ran an article on how the engineering graduate turned a Dh200,000 start-up into a multi-billion empire.

In 2016, India’s biggest apex trade association put Wisdom Jobs in the country’s top SME 50 Index and gave it a Certificate of Excellence. The same year a popular tech magazine named it Company of the Year.

Yet when you scratch beneath the surface, the picture that emerges is deeply unsettling.

Wisdom Jobs, which prides itself as the world’s first skill assessment based job-portal, has no real jobs.

The employment opportunities listed on it are either fake or copied from other recruitment portals and the phone interviews arranged by them don’t have prospective employers on the other end of the line but call centre agents operating from the company’s Hyderabad headquarters in south India.

In fact very little about Wisdom Jobs is real - except for the millions of dollars it reaps annually from the well-knit recruitment racket that extends beyond Indian shores, spanning Canada, USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore and the company’s favourite hunting ground -- the Middle East.

On the dedicated Gulf portal www.wisdomjobsgulf.com, the company has over 80,000 jobs in the UAE alone. People applying for these positions are directed to a login-screen where they are required to fill in their personal details, upload their CV and also choose their preferred Emirate from a dropdown menu.

No sooner have they done that, they get an email from a ‘career service adviser’ informing them that their CV has been shortlisted by multiple companies. Should that come as a surprise, candidates are assured that they are dealing with a reputed placement firm that fulfils the recruitment needs of 35,000 ‘top-notch companies’

For good measure, an overview of the ‘guaranteed’ job, complete with salary and perks is also emailed.

To clinch the offer, all what a candidate has to do now is pay a ‘resuming forwarding fees’ of Rs7,600 (Dh400). The truth is that this is just the beginning. In the days ahead, the unsuspecting job seeker would be tricked into shelling out more money towards a series of bogus fees and charges. By the time he breaks out of the vicious cycle, he would often be in a deficit of up to Dh7,000.

The bulk of the ill-gotten money at Wisdom Jobs, however, comes from resuming forwarding fees, said a former employer.

“At Dh400 per client, it may not appear much, but for a portal with 30 million registered users it adds up to a lot of money. Remember, we are talking volumes here,” he said.

To allay clients’ fear of losing the money, they are emailed a letter titled ‘Why Should You Pay?’. It tells them that the resume forwarding fees is being charged for jobs that are not in public domain but are rather exclusive.

“They [potential employers] have already gone through your profile in our database and felt that it serves the requirement, they have given 95% relevancy to your profile and are highly interested to interview you and select you,” states the letter which then goes on to list a slew of ‘benefits’ of paying, such as 100 per cent ‘guaranteed placement assistance’ and ‘immediate hiring’.

Thousands worldwide fall for the bait daily. Dubai-based professor Nikhat Shah said she paid Dh441 to Wisdom Jobs in November 2018 after being told that her CV has been shortlisted by 48 different organisations.

“I thought it was a small price as I was offered a Dh22,000 assistant professor’s job at a university with family accommodation, travel allowance and several benefits,” she recalled.

Nikhat said after she remitted the money she got a call from a senior career adviser (recruitment Middle East) at Wisdom Jobs asking her to expect an interview call.

Sure enough, she didn’t suspect anything amiss when the career adviser rang up a few days later and arranged a conference call with a woman who identified herself as Ms. Emma Cowan, senior human resource manager at the American University of Sharjah (AUS).

Now AUS does have Ms Emma Cowan on its rolls as senior HR manager. But neither she nor any one at the university ever contacted Nikhat.

As it turns out, the person who conducted the interview was an imposter. Unknown to Nikhat, the bogus interviewer carried out the pretense for nearly 45 minutes during which she covered a variety of topics.

“I was asked about qualitative research, differential learning, classroom engagement and my familiarity with online assessment tools. Who would have thought it was a sham,” said Nikhat.

At the end of the interview, the imposter asked Nikhat to wire another $450 to Wisdom Jobs towards ‘certification fees.’ Nikhat was told it would be refunded once she joined.

AUS is now weighing legal action against Wisdom Jobs.

In an email response to a Gulf News query, an AUS spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Ms. Emma Cowan, senior HR manager, never interviewed Ms Nikhat. We can also confirm that AUS has no connection with any entity known as 'Wisdom Jobs'. AUS is considering legal action against this entity.“

A former career adviser at Wisdom Jobs said they are given a data bank containing the details of HR representatives of hundreds of organisations across various sectors worldwide. “It comes handy to arrange interviews and gain trust,” he said.

Those who pay never hear back from Wisdom Jobs. Phone calls elicit no response while emails remain unanswered.

Sanjeev Kumar from India said he shelled out Rs 121,110 (Dh6,400) for a job that never existed. “They conducted an interview and offered me a chief engineer’s position in Park Hyatt, Maldives but now they have stopped taking my calls,” said Kumar.

Receipts shared by Kumar with Gulf News show details of the payments he made to Wisdom Jobs between April 26 and May 21 last year.

The same modus operandi was used to extort money from Pakistani Qamar Ahmed and Indian Roohi Shaista for nonexistent positions at ADNOC and DIFC.

Another victim, Anis Khan, who was interviewed by a man claiming to be the HR head of a British bank in Dubai, said he lost Dh1,200.

“The bank does have an HR head by the name given to me but he wasn’t the person who spoke to me. Who would have thought that an award-winning company would do something so brazen and get away with it,” he said.

Online forums are flooded with complaints from job-seekers describing how they were duped. Of them, 200 complaints are on just one platform alone and about 140 on another.

Sumant Wandekar (Dh2,900), Azam Ali (Dh1,250), Prasanth Padhi (Dh1,000), Tabreik Shaik (Dh900), Seshagiri Rao (Dh890), Vikrant Patil (Dh850), Ganesh Pawar (Dh500). The list of victims is long.

Among the many recent victims is Kuwait-based R.V.

In October 2018, he was interviewed by the purported HR head of Telford International Ltd for a senior chemist’s position.

“The interviewer appeared impressed with my answers and asked me to join in 10 days. I was still beaming with joy when the career service adviser called me and asked me to make a security deposit of one per cent of my estimated salary. Initially, I was reluctant but when he assured me that the money was refundable and I should not lose this ‘golden opportunity’, I wired Rs 45,000 (Dh2,300) to Wisdom Jobs. I haven’t heard back from them since. I have tried reaching to them but so far all my efforts have drawn a blank,” said R.V

The same fate awaited Asghar Khan (Saudi Arabia) Mike R (USA) Jagan (Germany) S.Nathan (UK) and A. Raj from Indonesia.

It’s not immediately known if any one lodged a complaint with Hyderabad police although a cursory internet search shows scores of tweets in which victims have tagged the city’s top police officials and sought action.

In some tweets, they have also tagged India’s external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.

Wisdom Jobs CEO Ajay Kolla is also the founder of a ISO9001:2008 certified information technology firm called Wisdom IT Services which offers some software solutions. But company insiders say it’s just a front and almost all their revenue comes from their recruitment portal. Since its launch in 2011, its annual growth rate has been more than 100 per cent. It 2012-2013 its annual turnover was 8 crore. By 2013-14 it had swelled to 22 crores and is now estimated to be around.

As a restaurant manager who “develops unpalatable menus” and “hastens the doom of F&B outlets by passing off recycled scrap as healthy nibbles” one would think no one would want to touch my CV even with a barge pole.

Wrong. Instead, my horrendous CV has turned out to be so immensely likeable that four top hotels in the UAE are vying with each other hire me.

But Wisdom Jobs’ reckons my best bet is Radisson Blu, Abu Dhabi

Shortly after I registered with the job portal with what could well be the world’s worst CV, I got a call from their senior career adviser (Middle East) Anurag D. saying how my resume has got the eye balls of four top hospitality groups in the country.

Subsequent emails showed me how I could choose my prospective employer……