How to Avoid Scam Employment Opportunities

In today's world of internet advertising and get rich quick schemes, how do you distinguish between a real job and a scam?

In 2001, I began looking for my first post-collegiate job. Having worked in retail and call-centers since the age of sixteen, I was looking for an opportunity in something bigger than that, a job where I could have an impact, where I could make a difference in a company - a job where I could begin a career and become successful.

In doing so, I pulled out the classified section of our local newspaper and began faxing my resume and calling as many companies as I could. Within a day I had an interview with a company I had never heard of before. The job was for an entry-level manager, in response to an ad that said "Wild and Crazy office!"

My interview was the next day. I was not impressed at all by the seedy office where the interview took place. There were about ten other candidates waiting to be interviewed. I was given an application and a crayon (yes, you read that right, a crayon) to fill it out with. Ten minutes later, I had my interview.

An hour afterward, I was hired. Being young and naïve, the seedy office, the ten other candidates waiting to be interviewed, the crayon I was handed to fill out my application and the quick turnaround did not trigger suspicions the way that it would today. I called my job and told them I had found a new opportunity and would not be coming back. I was excited. I had not yet finished my degree (I had one semester left) and I had already been given a $30,000/year management job!

Or, so I thought.

My first day of training was the next day. Imagine my surprise when I was put in a classroom with fifty other "management trainees" and told that we would not be getting paid until training was over. We sat through eight hours of lecturing about this new company we would be working for, and how we would soon be able to get our own offices and set our own hours. I left at the end of the first day not knowing what the company did, or what my role would be.

Skeptical, but hopeful, I went back. Two days later, the true nature of the job was revealed. We would be peddling perfume from the trunks of our cars. If we were successful at this, we could then get the management job and our own office to recruit our own team of unwitting "managers" who would help us earn money in the same way.

I may have been naïve, but I wasn't stupid. I knew right then that the whole deal was a scam. Call it a pyramid scheme or multi-level marketing, either way; it was a complete and total scam.

The day that this was revealed was also September 11, 2001, and not a time that anyone would have wished to be unemployed. It took me three months to find a new job.

In light of my experience with scam jobs, I am glad to provide the following five tips for avoiding getting sucked into the same situation.

1 - Do your research: About a month after leaving the "company" I found that there were a plethora of articles on websites such as www.ripoffreport.com by other people who had the same experience. If it is a company you have never heard of, do a gut-check and if something doesn't feel right, look it up.

2 - If it sounds too good to be true, it's not true - a company who offers to pay someone with no experience in a job a large amount of money after a five minute interview should raise suspicion.

3 - If they come to you unsolicited, skip over it - Around the same time I took this "job", I posted my resume on all of the popular job hunting websites. To this day, I still get emails wanting to offer tons of money for no experience. This is, again, where www.ripoffreport.com and the Better Business Bureau can come in handy.

4 - Never take a job with unpaid training - Unless it is a company that you know for sure is legitimate, or you are working a legitimate unpaid internship, you should always be paid while on the job - even for training.

5 - Do not stay quiet! - If this does happen to you, contact your local news media. Someone else who was taken by this operation in our area called the whistleblower line on one of our local television stations and the "business" was closed down.

Above all else, be careful, especially when searching for jobs online. If you can find the company's website, this is a good way to find out if they are legitimate, but even the company that I fell for now has a website (ScenturaCreations.com) though the business practices are outlined there as well.

If nothing else, I hope my story helps at least one person avoid falling for a scam job.