Description

I initially bumped into this company on LinkedIn after applying for through an alleged recruitment company. A text came from an Amelia Bailey. I didn’t recognize the name of the company or the number so I ran it through google and it did say a potential scam. That should have been my first clue, but when I responded and she brought up my app from LinkedIn I let my fear go. I interviewed with a seemingly real individual over zoom. Then was sent a job offer less than a week later. They told me onboarding would take a few days and then they would match me with a client within a week or two. Before I said yes to anything I researched them and found the website they sent. They even provided their company EIN information to prove they were real. So again I let my concerns go. The HR person said it would take a week or two to match me with a client but I received an email to match with someone before I even finished onboarding. The person was allegedly an acclaimed wildlife artist. Sent me a whole introductory write up about her. When I accepted the match we had our initial conversation completely through messaging on Teams because she was allegedly deaf. They had me set up a signal account to be able to send messages safely, etc. everything seemed to be above board until week 2 when I received a proposal that felt way too good to be true. The alarms were ringing. She had a whole written agreement and everything. Said she would contact HR as well to make sure everything was above board, but when I never heard from HR personally I did have even more concerns. Then she attempted to send me the check for registration, but FedEx intercepted the delivery both attempts and told me they were sending the packages to their security office due to invalid FedEx account. I didn’t even know that was a thing. So when I googled why they would do that I found that it is basically fraud detection. Then I received a call from another employee who bumped into basically a back door for the vascap website where he found all of our employee information and felt like this was all a scam. He was able to tell me all the things I had been doing for “work” because he was doing the same thing with the same client. Then I received a message from the client on signal saying that her computer had been hacked and I let her know that I was no longer comfortable communicating with her without seeing her. So she agreed to meet on zoom. We did but I could tell it was an AI person and she didn’t talk. The person kept sending me messages on signal rather than on zoom. And there was never sound on her end. Even if she is hard of hearing I would still be able to hear her surroundings if it was legit. I recorded the minute that I was on the zoom and I knew then that it was a scam. The website is apparently now “under maintenance” per the hr email I received for 5 days. Thankfully I lost no money, but they have my tax forms which means my address and SSN so I will be going to change my SSN tomorrow. I hope someone catches these people.