Description

I was contacted yesterday about a remote job as a remote Junior Video Editor (A job I have applied for through indeed, though I'm not sure if I applied for the specific company they claimed to be). Oddly the job was for a hospital, which one wouldn't expect to offer a JUNIOR editor job, as one would assume their needs would be short term and junior editor implies one would be working long enough to climb out of the junior position. So, I thought they would either commission either an experienced editor or contact a media company. Put I need more work experience and thought maybe they had some special project they were trying to assemble a cheap team for. The email said they wanted to do a preliminary interview to get to know me before considering me for the next stage of selection. It also said they only had openings for this interview that day and the next. So I signed up for an interview over Skype at 3:30 (they communicated with me a lot more quickly than I'm used to with potential employers), and when the interview started, it wasn't a video interview, but a texted based one. I immediately became suspicious, but went along with it. While I were discussing the job with someone calling themselves Heather Claussen, I looked up Northwest Specialty Hospital (the business they were representing). It was an actual business and they did have a Director of Operations named Heather Claussen, but the email address the site provided to contact human resources wasn't the same one that contacted me. There were a lot of long pauses between messages so I had time to look a number of things up. When I asked why a hospital needed to hire either a full-time or part-time video editor, the answer was very unsubstantial and the next message acted as if I hadn't asked that. I kept looking over the original email and the hospital's website. At closer look, both email address didn't look like normal ones (and the BBB's section to report email address rejected both of them) and while the website for the hospital seemed to match the actual website's at a glance, the one the scammers gave had at the end (northwestspecialtyhealth.com) instead of like the actual site (northwestspecialtyhospital.com). Furthermore, I noticed that the image this Heather Claussen used for her Skype messages was the same one show on her staff page on Northwest Specialty's website. I also found the hospital's career page and found no listing for a Junior Video Editor positon. When I brought this up, "Heather" said they were attempting to fill the position quickly or expected to have it filled soon and had already taken the posting down. At some point through all of this I used the hospital's actual listed email address (I never attempted to open the website the scam email provided) and told the hospital what was happening: the specific job offer and the use of Heather Claussen's name and image. Finally, the "Heather" I had been messaging through Skype said she was going to send my interview questions (All the standard describe yourself, "what are you like as and employee" questions that one would expect from a standard interview) to her higher ups (even though she was supposed to be the Director in charge of hiring) and see if I was would get the job. I already pretty much knew this was a scam at this point, because this was only supposed to be a preliminary interview, and I was suddenly getting the job without my employer ever seeing my face and giving somewhat lack luster answers that didn't get commented on. And after about ten minutes, I was informed that I was getting a job and they were going to send me a check to buy all the supplies they listed for the job, in order to have my own mini-office. The scammers then asked for my name, address, phone number, and email before they could send me documents to sign. That is when I told them I had contacted the actual hospital, and they stopped responding to me. Last thing. I may have been conversing with a program throughout the process. All the questions felt very stock and premade, and the answers to my questions were pretty inflexible and also felt somewhat premade. So, I'm not sure if the scammers were using a program or were very lazily just copy and pasting text they already had typed up. If may have been a person, because there were such long periods of time between their messages, which made me think they were either discussing things with partners or handling multiple such scams at the same time. On the other hand, if I took too long to respond, I would get a message saying they couldn't continue until I responded, even if what the message said didn't really require a response.