Ensuring CV security
At ClickAJob we DO take precautions to ensure the integrity of anything you upload. Your email address is withheld and we try to restrict postal details too. Other job sites may not do this, so it is still possible that some scam operator may approach you through your CV, demanding money for services you never asked for and could probably never use anyway. You DO have a defence and there ARE ways of stopping this. Here's how.
Report them
Before you do anything else, TELL US ABOUT IT. Send us a copy of the email you received with the address headers intact, so that the very least we can do is trace the source, take the scam operator off our Company list and prevent them from ever doing it again. Believe us, we don’t tolerate this kind of thing any more than you do, so the very least we will do is blacklist whoever it is, screen them out with our spam filters, and probably report them to their ISP.
You can take action against this kind of thing yourself too. Not just from approaches that come via our site, but from anywhere. It only takes a few steps to keep these monsters permanently out of your computer.
Block
Hunt around in your email program and under “Preferences” “Options” or “Setup” you’ll find you can block senders or add them to a banned list that prevents them coming in for ever. Activate this control and the cause of your irritation is taken care of right away.
Next, get your own back by reporting the scam company to one of the many spam databases on the web. The easiest to remember is www.spamcop.net. Make sure you do this because as soon as a lot of people start reporting a spammer, action happens very quickly. At the very least, the company’s ISP will shut them down and criminal action could follow. Take that, varmint!
Find out who they are
And now a defence against it happening again. Whenever a company contacts you about your CV, make a point of checking their return email address. A lot of scam operators are careless and use throwaway addresses from either hotmail or yahoo, that’s your clue that they are more than likely running a scam.
If you’re not sure, you can check their email authenticity too, by placing www in front of their email address, for example www.hotmail.com. This will show you that the source is from a free mail company and the senders are probably not who they say they are.
Call their bluff
Sometimes scammers get even craftier, using a well-known name like Goldman Sachs for example to lull you into thinking they’re real. Again the trick is to check the return email address. If it’s something like sales@hotmail.com you can bet it has nothing to do with Goldman Sachs and is a 100% scam. Report them to SpamCop.
Clever scammers can go even further, sometimes building an elaborate website that looks convincing with offers that are too good to be true. Be on your guard against such over-the-top deals, they are nothing but a scam and you should avoid them altogether.
Another way to find out what kind of scam you’re up against is to use Google to search for the company that’s trying to rip you off instead of the email address they hide behind. This might uncover a URL quite different to what you suspect, quite possibly yielding clues as to what they’re really up to.
Call the cops
If you can’t find out anything about them on Google, try the real cops - chances are good they already know who the scam-merchants are and are on the case. To access the Metropolitan Police visit www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/news/emp_fraud.htmwhere you will find they are very helpful.
We hope these tips are useful and help to make the problem go away. If not, or if you have any other issues you’d like to raise, please make a point of contacting us via support@clickajob.co.uk. The more you tell us, the more we can do to make life easier online.