What do you know about “phishing”?
I’ve heard the term, and I knew it had to do with stealing personal information through phony emails and such. Here’s a better description, from Yahoo! Tech:
Phishing is a one of the fastest-growing cybercrimes, according to the FBI, and one that costs consumers millions of dollars each year. These scams have one purpose: to get as much personal information from a user as possible. This includes login information, Social Security numbers, date of birth, and other identifiable information that can help scammers open up bogus accounts under your name or steal from your existing ones.
Reading the blog post linked above, as well as the “How to Spot a Phishing Scam” in the follow-up post, might be a good idea for you if you’ve posted your resume onto any of the online job board sites, such as Monster, Career Builder, or Yahoo! Hot Jobs.
Why, you ask? Because these phishers are now sending phony emails to resume posters, asking them to fill out online applications in order to steal your personal information, as Annys Shin writes for the Washington Post. A brief excerpt:
Job seekers who posted their resumes on Monster, Career Builder and Yahoo received e-mails from either USA Voice or Instant Human Resources, telling them that based on the their resumes they qualified for a promising sounding position. Those who didn’t smell a scam right away filled out online applications, in the process disclosing personal information.
Some get as far as entering a Social Security number. Many only get to name and address before backing out. At that point, job offers don’t come pouring in, but spam does.
The job sites have gotten wise to these schemes and, for the past several years, have been posting warnings on their Web sites in an effort to educate users before it’s too late. They also pre-screen job postings and monitor them daily. But it seems inevitable that scams will get through.
What can you do to help protect yourself and prevent something like this from happening? Thankfully, it’s nothing different from what you should be doing in your job search in general.
If you get a hit from your resume, before you respond, do your due diligence. Research the company – look all around their website, do a few Google and Yahoo! searches on them, and learn as much as you can before you decide to jump at an application process.
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