Online recruitment services: another playground for fraudsters
Sokratis Vidros, Constantinos Kolias, Georgios Kambourakis · Computer Fraud & Security · 2016
It is increasingly common for someone actively seeking a job online to come across appealing but fake ads offering high wages, flexible hours, teleworking and career growth opportunities. Usually, job ads with such favourable conditions are examples of Online Recruitment Fraud (ORF) which attempt to collect unsuspecting candidates’ personal information. ORF is a relatively new field of variable severity that can escalate quickly to extensive scams. Corporate hiring has recently been ported to the cloud. However, this has fuelled a new type of online scam that jeopardises job seekers’ privacy and harms the reputation of organisations. Employment scams share common characteristics with others, such as email spam and phishing, but also have their own peculiarities. Sokratis Vidros and Georgios Kambourakis of the University of the Aegean, Greece and Constantinos Kolias of George Mason University, US present a preliminary analysis of real-life fraudulent job ads.