Description

I responded to a job posting for an executive assistant for Alvesco Construction on Indeed. I was contacted by email for an interview. I was asked to contact Karlene Hinton on Signal with the username THEHRALVESCO.80 to set up an interview time. I did. The interview was set for 7/11/24 at 10 am CST. They wanted to conduct an interview via secure messenger. I thought it was strange, but I decided to proceed to see what would happen. Karlene was not the one who talked to me. A person claiming to be Leo Alves conducted the interview. He got my name, address, and phone number. He also got the names and numbers of my references. I was sent a DocuSign job offer to accept. So they got my electronic signature. He started asking what was my bank and if I had the app on my phone. He wanted to send a PDF check for a sign on bonus and to pay for equipment. He used the phrasing merchant instead of vendor and deal instead of contract. I used to negotiate contracts with vendors for my previous supervisor. The terminology didn’t add up. So I looked up the address for the business. Google Maps shows it as a residential area and house. The house kind of looks like the pictures online for the reviews posted. For a construction company, there was only one Yelp review and not many Google reviews. All Google reviews were 5 stars and almost a year old. Not much of an online presence. A quick google search showed on Reddit experience with fake job scams from construction companies that wanted to commit check fraud and gain banking information. Some people fell for it. The PDF check he wanted to send me was not from his company either. He said that it was an affiliate company and thus would have a different name and logo. I used to work at a bank and dealt with people experiencing check fraud like this. When he kept insisting about the bank information, I told him that he was phishing and that he was going to hell. He stopped responding after that. I reported the fake job to Indeed too.