Uh oh. A weird and detailed scam targeting job seekers (many new college graduates) seems to be making the rounds. It’s so strange and unfortunate, that we wanted to detail here in the hopes of keeping people out of the strange web. The bottom line is that the fraudsters steal PII (personally identifiable information), including banking details by posting as legitimate hiring companies. The repercussions are serious, as they intend to dip straight into bank accounts. Here are the details:
We received a number of form fills on our contact-us page with messages like this:
Hello,
I received an email from juliethcasas@orangemarketing.works
Stating that I "have been shortlisted for an online interview for the position of VIDEO EDITOR at ORANGE MARKETING."
This is fantastic if true. However, I had a similar acceptance email a couple of weeks ago and it was a total scam. I only found out by contacting the alleged company.
Can someone confirm or deny that you are interested in my services? I don't want to be scammed again.
Thanks and have a great day.
Okay weird.
Another interaction with a job shopper provided the job description they received which was a full-on SCAM job description with the Orange Marketing logo, address and copy from the website.
We discovered that the fraudster was forwarding their domain above (won’t list here) to OrangeMarketing.com. We contacted HubSpot and asked if they could prevent the website in question from resolving to orangemarketing.com when a redirect was requested from the bad actor. In essence, block the website call for redirect at the HubSpot server level. HubSpot said no can do. This was a thing way back in the day when we all owned our own servers and were not hosting through AWS and such.
HubSpot suggested we submit a complaint to the domain provider, which is a GREAT idea, and we did so immediately. You can use free tools like this one on GoDaddy to locate the domain provider; generally, there is an email to which you can report complaints. So we did. No answer from NameSilo.com. Even though the domain was purchased a day before the complaints started, and obviously for the purposes of fraud.
We also improved our contact form, so that when “job seekers” fill out our form, they get an auto email that lets them know what is going on.
Even weirder, on Reddit, there appeared to be another Orange Marketing in South Africa who was subjected to the same problems a month or two ago. GEEZ. An argument for purchasing every permutation and combination of your company name as a domain. This is expensive but should be done for any company that plans to be pretty large one day. So we posted our warnings on Reddit too.
We continued to reach out to job candidates and express our regrets. About fifteen people have filled out the Contact Us form to date.
But this interaction on Linkedin, in particular got to me.
This gentleman reached out on LinkedIn and then called me personally to walk me through the detailed nature of the scam (as I was undoubtedly curious).
This guy went through unbelievable hoops, including multiple interviews and submitting a video practicum that he was “required” to work on over the weekend. He sadly commented to me, “My video was pretty good too.” I wondered, even though a waste of time, where was the scam? He told me at the end, the scammer asked for a copy of a “check” or his banking information for something or other required for job application. At that point, he knew it was nonsense. And he was super disappointed.
We discussed what could be done. He suggested Orange Marketing create social media posts and a blog post so anyone researching our company would immediately know it is a scam. GOOD IDEA KID.