CASE STUDIES
A representative selection of victims of job scams. None were able to get a refund from their placement agency, but one did lead the police to his alleged scammers.
MUMBAI 20,000May 2017 paid for services pitched as routine precursors to a job Asif Hussain
Hussain, a mid-level risk analyst with a global firm who was looking for a new job, uploads his résumé on popular jobs websites.
He gets a call from Jobishh telling him that it “has opportunities” for him at three international companies. All he has to do is buy Jobishh products such as “résumé services”.
He pays the company ₹20,000.
Asked to pay for “document verification”, a step he believed should follow a job offer, Hussain realises he has fallen into a trap.
But when he requests a refund, Jobishh refuses.
BENGALURU1lakh April 2017 paid for services described as “processing formalities” Anupama Chandran
Chandran, an IT professional with 18 years’ experience, gets a call from a placement agency called Vision Profile telling her she can get a job at the IT services company Cognizant.
She goes through two “precise, sophisticated” interviews on the phone for over six hours and makes a series of payments that add up to ₹100,000.
Chandran sends a series of emails with qualifying documents to an address containing the word Cognizant that she’d been given by a representative of Vision Profile.
They come bouncing back to her inbox. Chandran looks up Vision Profile online and finds dozens of complaints from job seekers alleging that they have been cheated by the placement agency.
Chandran files a complaint with the Bengaluru cyber police.
HYDERABAD2lakh July 2017 paid for fake job offers with several IT companies Sardar Gurpreet Singh
Singh gets a call from a man who claims to be an employee of Naukri.com and offers him jobs at Cognizant, Genpact, and Accenture.
He is directed to a website called Mynaukrionline.com and asked to pay ₹2 lakh as a processing fee. He uses Citrus Pay to transfer the amount.
After realising he’d been scammed, Singh complains to the police, who make two arrests. The accused were found to have cheated hundreds of job seekers across India of ₹50 to ₹60 lakh altogether.