Cau­tion!

Let’s play detective!

As part of the How… To Find a Job in Canada series, I already talked about job scams. Today, I will show you how to not be tricked by scam­mers based on a recent example.

A lit­tle while ago, I received a com­ment on the post 3 Qual­i­ties Job-Seekers Must Have. The author of the com­ment was won­der­ing if the job she had applied for was a scam. She pasted a quote of the email she had received. When I read the fol­low­ing, I knew it smelled bad: “You will have to make a funds deposit with the com­pany prior to issu­ing you the doc­u­ments you will need to secure your work per­mit and upon your arrival to Canada, your money will be reim­bursed back to you in full.”

I con­tacted the com­menter and urged her to not do any­thing before I inves­ti­gate a bit. At this point, I was 90% sure this was an immi­gra­tion job scam but I wanted to get to the bot­tom of things.

So, here goes the story. The com­menter, based in the Philip­pines, had applied for this job offered in Toronto, Canada. The com­pany, MET Inter­na­tional, is an Amer­i­can com­pany based in Car­rolton, Texas, but it allegedly has an office in Toronto. After she applied, MET Inter­na­tional sent her a “fund deposit agree­ment form”. She was sup­posed to send the com­pany $500 for it to process her work per­mit appli­ca­tion and to show her com­mit­ment to come work for the com­pany in Canada.

There were quite a few red flags in just the email body:

• The spelling was pretty erratic: ran­dom caps, weird punc­tu­a­tions such as in “what we do,You can Visit our web­site”. It didn’t look pro­fes­sional at all.
• The over­seas appli­cant was required to “make a Min­i­mum deposit of $500”, which is “just a manda­tory pol­icy that you made a deposit with the com­pany prior to issu­ing out the documents”.
• “The funds have to be trans­ferred via west­ern union or money gram”. I don’t know for you, but for me, a West­ern Union deposit means “you will never see your money again”.
• Addi­tion­ally, the pay­ment was sup­posed to be sent to a “Regional Accoun­tant”, Mrs Laura Boyn­ton, based in Florida, USA. The address, “4616 W. Mead­own Ave Suit 402” isn’t spelled prop­erly and doesn’t match a business.

As for the MET Inter­na­tional Agree­ment itself…(click on the link to see the PDF):

• The let­ter­head didn’t look pro­fes­sional, MET Inter­na­tional logo looked scanned and was barely legible.
• The address of the com­pany office in Toronto (287 Macpher­son Avenue Suite 301) didn’t match a business.
• The agree­ment states: “In a suc­cess­ful pro­cess­ing of the work per­mit, the above named appli­cant as auto­mat­i­cally become an employee of the com­pany, with the com­pany respon­si­ble for financ­ing the whole trip and respon­si­ble for pro­vid­ing a six month accom­mo­da­tion for the appli­cant with his/her fam­ily until he/she set­tles down. The fund deposit of $500 which the appli­cant has ini­tially deposited will also be refunded.” Really, this is too good to be true. Some com­pany when hir­ing over­seas may pro­vide mov­ing expenses but no com­pany will com­mit for so much (and note that the phras­ing is very vague).
• Note that the job offer adver­tised for an admin­is­tra­tive assistant/ cus­tomer ser­vice posi­tion. With all the respect I have for peo­ple work­ing in sim­i­lar posi­tions, this isn’t the kind of job for which you must resort to hir­ing over­seas. Plenty of Cana­di­ans have the nec­es­sary skills to fill the position.

Finally, I vis­ited the web­site of the com­pany, MET Inter­na­tional. It appeared to be a legit busi­ness, although the address of the com­pany was slightly dif­fer­ent than the one in the email (1900 Sur­veyor Road instead of 1900 Sur­veyor Blvd). How­ever, a small line at the bot­tom of the page caught my eye: “We are located in Car­roll­ton, Texas, and DO NOT have any loca­tions out­side of this main loca­tion. Please beware of any­one else try­ing to rep­re­sent them­selves as our company.”

Ah AH! So I guess there are no offices in Toronto, are they! The way the sen­tence was phrased made me think that peo­ple were scammed before. I wrote to the company:

“I’m Cana­dian and have a blog about immi­gra­tion. One of my read­ers recently send me an email about a sup­pos­edly job offer he got from your com­pany. It seems bogus to me.

I noticed your web­site states that you are located in Texas and do not have loca­tion out­side the US. Can you con­firm that?

Thank you for your cooperation”

I received the fol­low­ing reply:

“Yes, we are a small com­pany with an office in Car­roll­ton, Texas only. These guys are scamsters.

We have reported to our local police, the FBI, but no results yet.

Hope some­one catches them. We have taken the pains to write a let­ter to any­one who emails us to ask if we have offices out­side Texas. A lot of peo­ple have thanked us for tak­ing the time. There are how­ever a few naïve, des­per­ate folks that have sent the $500 to these scam­sters unfortunately.

Hope this comes to an end and these guys are brought to justice.”

He added later:

“They had a web­site metintl.com that was a CARBON copy of our web­site. Our attor­neys had to send legal paper­work to the host­ing com­pany to have that web­site shut down.

We are now try­ing to shut down their email address that uses the metintl.com.

Other com­pa­nies have reported to us that they are also vic­tims. CWI in NJ is fac­ing sim­i­lar prob­lems with these same scamsters.”

I later found out that peo­ple were report­ing this scam on Ripoff report on sev­eral instances. The name of the com­pany seems to be used in a vari­ety of scams, includ­ing a phoney cheque scam and over­pay­ment fraud scheme.

Morale of the story? Be very care­ful when apply­ing for jobs abroad. A lot of peo­ple want to come and work in Canada, in the U.K., in the U.S.A etc. and scam­mers know how to use people’s weak­nesses. Use your judg­ment to not be fooled and if some­thing looks fishy, do some research before you com­mit to any­thing. And remem­ber: if it’s too good to be true… it prob­a­bly isn’t legit nor true!

Related arti­cles:

1. Avoid Job Scams (4÷10)
2. Rebel France IV
3. 5 Immi­gra­tion Mis­takes To Avoid
4. 3 Unex­pected Con­se­quences of Immigration
5. Pic­ture of the Week: BlackBerry