Joblessness Blues: How The Internet Scams Students

By Nick Gardner on February 25, 2013

I don’t mean to make waves right off the bat. I just have to say, unemployment sucks, in every way conceivable. It drains the life out of you as your extended periods of free time are occupied by the troika of ennui, anxiety and futility, briefly punctuated by moments of rejection. All the while, as your bank account dwindles, there’s some kind of stigma that you’re lazy or unmotivated. That’s why you haven’t found a job.

It’s not fun, but making matters worse is what seems to be an epidemic of scammers on the Internet.

If you’ve looked for a part-time job on Craigslist, this shouldn’t be news to you, especially if you’ve ever responded to any kind of administrative/personal assistant job only to receive a response such as this gem I received, titled inconspicuously ”Administrative Assistant Position”:

 

Allen MacKay Needs An Administrative Assistant

 

After wading through enough fraudulent Craigslist postings to compromise my e-mail address, I decided to give the site a break and look elsewhere.

But where? LifeHacker, that’s where!

I realized that if I couldn’t actually get my sh*t together, I could still listen to successful people and follow suit. Taking their advice, I checked out Indeed.com (referred to as “Google for careers”), the premiere site for finding jobs, according to LifeHacker’s audience.

Indeed, Indeed was more professional-looking than Craigslist, with many of the postings referring you through third-party sites by which to submit your application, rather than just e-mailing a resume and cover letter through Gmail. Yet, for all Indeed’s professionalism and highfalutin reputation, I still received no responses, except for one, from an individual claiming to represent Hewlett-Packard.

Scamzola

 

Weird formatting and capitalization aside, I still needed a job. I couldn’t not follow this through. Oh, did I mention they were offering $20/hour? That kind of money for an entry-level position is enough to quell a man’s questions about why a multinational computer company would be using Yahoo Messenger to interview hires. And isn’t Curtis Jackson 50 Cent’s real name? I digress.

Starved for any kind of response, I installed the program, added “Patricia Bowers” and went to my kitchen to make dinner. Upon return, I found that I’ve been added as friend and an interview had been scheduled for 9 AM the following morning. Desperate for a job, I woke up early that Saturday and logged onto Yahoo Messenger.

Sidenote: Regrettably, I uninstalled Yahoo Messenger soon after the ‘interview,’ thereby deleting my log of the conversation, but I can give a synopsis, highlighting the red flags that went off in the conversation.

 

- I awaken, sign onto Yahoo Messenger and apologize to ‘Patricia Bowers’ in advance for my Internet, which I’m sure will cut out in the course of the interview.

- ‘Patricia’ tells me about herself, credentials and whatnot, claiming to have graduated from school in Louisiana with a degree in business. There’s too much backstory, in my opinion, but I’m tired and just trying to stay awake while finding synonyms for “cool” to keep the conversation moving.

-  ‘Patricia’ describes the details of the job, which is mostly focused on data entry, and tells me I’ll be working from home. This sets off the first red flag in my sleepy brain, as the job was listed as a front office position. When questioned, ‘Patricia’ replies that the office won’t be ready for some period of time (a MAJOR red flag, considering the position was listed in New York City), but until then, the company will provide me with a free laptop to work with.

- ‘Patricia’ is apparently an Alice Cooper fan, because, as it turns out, the ‘free’ laptop isn’t so free at all. I’ll be required to purchase a series of accounting programs through a company contractor. So how does the company do this? Do they dock my sizable paycheck until everybody’s square? Nah, but the contractor takes MoneyGram or Western Union. If that isn’t a giant red flag, I don’t know what is. As if by some kind of divine intervention, the Internet cuts out, and I feel the need for a shower.

- After an invigorating rinse, I return to find that ‘Patricia’ has been patiently waiting for me to come back online. At this point, I’m fully awake and just about done with this nonsense. Curious to see her response, I express my concerns that she might be (gasp!) trying to scam me.

- Unsurprisingly, ‘Patricia’ doesn’t give up her façade. Instead, she suddenly remembers that she has a meeting in fifteen minutes, at 10 AM on a Saturday, and acts like she’s playing hardball with a job we both know doesn’t exist. When I use the word ‘scam,’ she acts incredulous, claiming something along the lines of “I am a 56 year old grandmother. I want to spend the rest of my years with my children, not creating some kind of complex hoax.” As she begins on a rant about how I must “trust in God to obtain happiness” or some other chestnut that scammers always try to pull, my Internet craps out and I chuckle to myself.

 

The Internet was cruel enough when it was just filled with scammers and spammers looking to make a buck off of any poor shmuck trying to free the assets of a Mozambican widow, cash in a windfall in a British lottery they never entered or just looking to buy blackmarket Viagra.

Are people becoming so callous they’re farming the pockets of the desperate, jobless masses trying to improve themselves?

I can’t wait until we start harvesting organs through DropBox.

 

 

 

 

Image taken from Above the Law and Indeed.

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