Employment and Mystery Shopper Scams
Cyber-criminals are very effective with employment and mystery shopper scams with students. In fact the scale of the employment mystery shopper scams is mind-blowing. Cyber-criminals use botnets to send out zillions of spam messages every day. Most of the time innocent recruits, like students, do their work by being tricked into providing their account username and password. Once the cyber-criminals have your account credentials they use your account to send even more spam.
It’s important you become knowledgeable on cyber scams and take responsibility of protecting your account. Be cautious even if you see genuine company logos, including the university's logo, and remember if it looks to good to be true, it probably is a scam. These cyber-criminals change their Web site name, often monthly, as their Web site gets blacklisted. The Web site usually continues to look the same, but the addresses are changing, which is a red flag in detecting a scam.
If you think you've received a mystery shopper scam, look for the signs and remember the rules to help you avoid being scam. If you think you've received an employment scam visit Scamdex. Scamdex is an online e-mail scam resource and they provide a comprehensive list of the most recent job scams on the internet.