A few days ago, I wrote a post sending some love to Craigslist.org for their efforts to combat job-related scams.

This morning, I received an e-mail from Monster.com warning me about job scams when searching “online.” It didn’t go so far as to say scam ads are alive and well at Monster.com, but we take what we can get. (Pssst! Hey, Monster. The first step in recovery is admitting you have a problem.)

I would like to see a little stronger language from them, and more important, some policing of ads posted on their site. But this is definitely a step in the right direction so kudos to Monster for that. Yahoo? It’s your turn now.

Here is the email in its entirety. I copy it here because of its good information about online scams revolving around jobs.

3 Scams to Avoid In an Online Job Search

“If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” Whether you are searching for a new job through Monster or other websites, keep in mind that the same technological innovations that help in your job search may be used by cyber-criminals looking to lure job seekers into questionable job “opportunities.”

Monster, the worldwide leader in the online recruitment industry, makes protecting job seekers a top priority. While Monster continually monitors its network and database to detect and terminate fraudulent access or job postings, keep in mind that Monster’s primary purpose is to serve as an open forum for employers to advertise open positions and a service for job seekers to broadcast their qualifications to interested employers. We work hard to ensure that only appropriate parties (such as employers) have access, but neither we nor any other online recruitment company can guarantee that inappropriate parties will not gain access to a posted resume. Accordingly, we’d like to remind you of what you can do to help keep yourself safe during a job search.

Know What to Avoid

Some employment scams appear as job postings or classifieds while others may target victims with an offer through an unsolicited email. Below are the most common scams you may see:
Money-Laundering Scams
Money launderers often create job descriptions that offer commissions or pay as high as $2000 per day to process checks on behalf of foreign nationals. They are recruiting local citizens to “process payments” or “transfer funds,” because as foreign nationals, they can’t do it themselves. The image below is an example of a money laundering scam hidden behind what appears to be an offer of employment.

Reshipping Scams
Reshipping, or postal forwarding, scams typically require job seekers to receive stolen goods in their own homes– frequently consumer electronics — and then forward the packages, often outside the United States. Those who fall for reshipping scams may be liable for shipping charges and even the cost of goods purchased online with stolen credit cards. Read more about reshipping scams here. »

Pre-pay/Work at Home Scams
Although there are genuine jobs working at home, many “offers” are not valid forms of employment and may have the simple goal of obtaining an initial monetary investment from the victim. Using claims such as ‘be your own boss’ and ‘make money quickly’, Work at Home scams will not guarantee regular salaried employment and almost always require an “up-front” investment of money for products or instructions before explaining how the plan works.

Protect Yourself

What seems like a lucrative job offer could cost you your savings and more. Learn to identify the signals of an employment scam to protect yourself. When conducting a job search:
Look for signals in a job posting or email offer, which could serve as an indicator that what is being presented as employment is not legitimate. Don’t get involved with an employer that can’t make its business model perfectly clear to you or one that’s willing to hire you without even a phone interview. Do your own research on any employer that makes you feel at all uneasy.

Never put your social security or national ID number, credit card number, bank account number or any type of sensitive personal identification data in your resume. You should never share any personal information with a prospective employer, even if they suggest that it is for a “routine background check”, until you are confident that the employer and employment opportunity is legitimate. Use Monster’s resume visibility options to ‘Be Safe’.

Do not engage in any transaction in which you are requested to transfer or exchange currency or funds to a prospective employer. Remain alert for the Work at Home employers who require you to make an up-front investment.

Be cautious when dealing with individuals/companies from outside your own country.
If you see a questionable job posting or suspect misuse of the Monster website or its brand, please report the suspected fraud to Monster.

If you think you have been a victim of fraud, immediately report the fraud to your local police and contact Monster, so steps can be taken to ensure your safety. We also recommend that you file an online report with The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). For more information on how to conduct a safe job search, visit Monster’s Security Center. You can also check out LooksTooGoodToBeTrue.com.

This is an update for those of you not following the story at carepages.com. The family now asks that no more cards be sent:

Wow! The outpouring of love and concern for Noah is just amazing! Scott and I never in a million years thought that so many people would want to send Christmas cards to Noah. However, please note: We did already celebrate Christmas LAST Sunday — November 8th.

PLEASE STOP SENDING CARDS AND GIFTS!!!!

Noah is very ill. He is not getting out of bed and it’s time for Scott, our families, and I to concentrate on our son. His time is very short and he needs us.

Scott and I would like to say thank you so much for the support and continued show of love. However, we are asking that everyone please stop sending cards and gifts.

Also, everyone please post the stop order on Facebook and any other websites or organizations that you belong to. We need the peace right now.

Thank you for your understanding in this request.

How much mail did Noah get? On Nov. 11, the family announced:

We received 80,000 pieces of mail on Monday alone!

Eighty. Thousand. Cards. Wow. God, are you listening?

Thanks for your support, folks. You’re a good bunch of people. Makes me wonder what else we could accomplish in this little corner of cyberspace with the holidays on the horizon.

Any ideas? Speak up in the comments.

When you responded to the ad, you were told to pay money up front for a “membership” or for “training” or special software or whatever. Our mantra, never pay for a job, started back then.

The scammers and their tactics have only changed slightly. They still pretend to be offering you a job when what they really want is to sell you crap, but now, big names in cyberspace are fighting back. Google cracked down on scammy ads; the FTC is pressing charges. The good guys have won some victories.

Craigslist is one of the good guys. Our e-book teaches you how to find legitimate jobs through Craigslist while avoiding the scams, and now, Craigslist is helping fight the bad guys. If you go to a Craigslist site and click the Jobs heading to browse the job listings, you’ll see this warning:

SCAM ALERT – affiliate scammers are posting bogus ads promising (nonexistent!) employment, paid research trials, or other compensation, but then notifying repliers that they’ll need to jump through a hoop first…all in hopes of earning affiliate marketing commissions or otherwise profiting at the expense of persons seeking employment.

The warning then goes on to list some of the tactics we have been warning about from the beginning. Again, we have nothing against affiliate marketing. But we draw the line at deceptive practices that pretend to offer you a job while taking your money on the sly.

This is excellent news. It means that, FINALLY, one of the big ad listing sites is taking another step toward responsibility for the crap posted on its pages. If Monster and Yahoo and other sites would follow suit, we would have fewer victim stories.

And we’ve promoted blogging in a number of ways, from telling you about great blog training to offering to set up your blog for free.

Some might wonder why the repeated push. Why do we keep harping about blogging as a way to make money?

It’s because of stories like this.

Pat lost his job during the economic downturn in the USA.

Just 12 short months later, he’s made $203,219.04 online.

Pat makes money selling an ebook from his blog.

The topic is quite obscure – he’s helping people with a special exam that some architects choose to do called the “LEEDs” exam (Pat lost his job as an architect).

Crazy stuff. And we trust the source (Yaro Starak), having worked extensively with him for a couple of years now. You can listen to how Pat set up his blog, created his book (he just used his blog posts as content!) and how he was able to make so much money so quickly, in the interview at this link.

Yes, it’s true: Pat’s case is exceptional. Most people who start a blog won’t make a dime. But making no money is a choice. Why? Because the steps Pat followed are well documented. Making money from blogs is no mystery…it just requires action.

Those who take action are the exceptions.

So I thought I’d toss it out there for you all, and someone who’s really ready to work hard to start their own business can take it and run. And then you can tell us all your success story about how you made money from home.

Do you have a scanner and a digital camera? A mind for detail and organization? Then this might be for you.

Sell Photo and Document Backup Services

You know those shoeboxes full of papers and falling-apart photo albums at your parents’ or grandparents’ house? They are just one house cleaning away from being lost forever.

You could take those important documents and photos and create electronic backups using your scanner. Everyone has paper documents they should back up and most people have tons of old photos that they would be happy to preserve—if only someone could do it for a decent price.

You could charge a flat fee per item based on its size and give the person a CD or DVD that contains a copy of those irreplaceable photos and documents. You could think of other ways to add value, too, such as by creating an attractive book or setting up a Web site where the customer’s family could see the old photos that might have been permanently gone.

So what do you think? This could work, right? I think it’s a service that everyone needs.

It’s Up to You

You don’t have to rely on the job market or fickle make-money-online opportunities. I believe that all that stands between you and a profitable home business is an understimulated imagination.

If you liked the idea above, but it’s not quite right for you, you might want to take a look at In Your PJs, a book that will help you generate tons of other ideas for businesses you can build from home. Not gimmicky things like MLM, but real businesses in which you meet a real need and get paid real money.

The book and its resources is the best tool I know for overcoming that problem of the understimulated imagination. Check it out today.

Quite often, people even search through our archives first. They do their due diligence and then write a message like this one, from alert reader Joanna:

Hello. Great site.

I came across this web site homebizlast.com/ and could not find anything about it in your archives.

A person whom I only know on facebook (young daughter of real life friend) claims to have made 150 dollars in one day.

I will ask her about it, but she is very young – around 17. Have you come across this site before?

Here’s the problem, and there’s no way Joanna and the other diligent readers would know this. (By the way, Joanna, I love your accent!)

We HAVE covered homebizlast.com, just not in that particular disguise. Not with that exact name. The same scams go by different names and just recycle the same sales pages and tactics over and over.

Truth be told, I think there are like five scams on the Internet. But they wear hundreds, nay, thousands of different masks.

Homebizlast.com is one of them. What is it? It’s Easy Google Profit dressed up to look like a legitimate news site. It tries to sound like a news story. It runs a script that makes the newspaper title and location local to you. (Mine is called the “Utah Online Edition” and the person making $5k per month lives in Salt Lake City. Where are these details located when you visit homebizlast.com? Speak up in the comments to play Where In The World Is This Scam Today?! It will be fun!)

We wrote about this fake news tactic here. That was back in May and it was selling Easy Google Profit even then.

So, thanks for the question, Jo. It turns out we have written extensively about the so-called Google scams. They’re all the same. Here’s a good place to start—the Master List of Google Scams.

If you hate spam like I do, there’s a good chance Sanford Wallace is responsible for your attitude.

The good news? He just lost a big legal fight with Facebook. A court has ordered him to pay Facebook $711 million for hacking members’ accounts and using them to send phony posts and messages. And the court referred the case to the US attorney’s office for possible criminal prosecution. (Read the story.)

YES! It’s Bozos like him that have given Internet and email marketing a bad rap. They are the back-alley underbelly of a legitimate business that just about anyone can do.

Will he ever pay the full penalty? Of course not. But today is still a good day for the Internet.

My friend was, until recently, one of the millions of unemployed. He lost an excellent management job back in August and was thrown into the scary, mine-filled waters of the online job search.

He’s smart, so he was able to avoid most of the turds floating around in that lagoon.

One of them caught his attention, though. He signed up for a free resume critique at The Ladders. Theladders.com caters to executives and claims to help its members land career management jobs paying more than $100k per year.

It offers a free critique of your resume. You upload it and a resume expert goes through it and gives feedback on it. My friend uploaded his and got really good feedback about why it wasn’t landing him any interviews.

But, along with the feedback came an offer. We will rewrite your resume and cover letter for a mere $700!

Wow. Time for a big pause. To be honest $700 is nothing if it helps you get a job that pays more than $100,000. But could ladders.com really deliver on its promises? A careful search through a skeptic’s eyes (mine) turned up this:
A client of a resume writer certified by the National Resume Writer’s Association (the NRWA, who knew?) submitted a resume to the ladders and got back a blistering critique. The accredited writer found that “After reading the critiques that bashed the resumes they created, I found that the information they provided was not only subjective, but it was often inaccurate and incorrect.” (Read the discussion.)

Got that? Inaccurate AND incorrect! That’s a double negative!

I also found that the Wall Street Journal offers a similar service—free critique and a fee-based rewrite—for less. And the NRWA can also refer job seekers to certified resume writers who would do the rewrite for even less.

Bottom line, friend rewrote the resume himself based on the feedback he received, got interviews, and is now once again employed. And he didn’t spend $700 to do it.

All of my kids except one have had it, but so far, Her Hotness and I have stayed clean. We’re hoping it stays that way. It’s draining our schools and churches here, with health officials surprised that it is hitting so hard, so early in the season. That means you have a lot of people sick, worried about getting sick, and ready to pay to avoid it.

And of course, that only means one thing: it’s a scammer’s market ready for the reaping!

Are we appalled? Yes. Are we surprised? We are not. Check out the story:

Federal officials have warned promoters of more than 140 products sold over the Internet about fraudulent claims that they can prevent, treat or diagnose swine flu.
Bogus products include devices and sprays that claim to sterilize the air or surfaces, and dietary supplements claiming to boost the immune system. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it even has found fake Tamiflu being sold online without a prescription.

Want to have a look at some of the scammy products? Just Google “swine flu” and look at the sponsored search results. Chances are good that you’ll spot the products making false claims. Check out Microsan, for instance, at stop-h1n1.com. See the fear-stoking headlines at the top? They’re designed to prod you into a quick purchase before your critical thinking skills kick in.

The problem is bad enough that the FDA created a Swine Flu consumer fraud detection team, which spotted about 10 new product a day being promoted. All of them were making untested, unproven claims, and some of the products were downright dangerous. Check out the useful warnings at the FDA:

On May 1, 2009, FDA and the FTC warned that consumers who purchase products which claim to protect against or treat the 2009 H1N1 virus, but are not approved by FDA for the treatment or prevention of influenza, are risking their health and the health of their families.

These fraudulent products come in all varieties and could include dietary supplements, medical foods, or products that claim to prevent or cure the 2009 H1N1 influenza.

FDA announced that it has initiated an aggressive strategy to identify, investigate, and take regulatory or criminal action against individuals and businesses that wrongfully promote purported 2009 H1N1 influenza products in an attempt to take advantage of the current flu public health emergency.

Full disclosure: we won’t be testing any of these products. Maybe we could get Steve to inject or ingest an unknown substance purchased online, but it won’t be me. The flu sucks, but so do the potential hazards of swallowing something made in Albania with misspelled English words on the label.

For real information on Swine Flu, look to the Centers for Disease Control. Wash your hands often and don’t make out with strangers on the bus or subway without a surgical mask.

More and more people are turning to the Internet as a tool to find jobs. It’s almost indispensable, in fact, to any job search. Even if you don’t use the big job sites, you will need to visit your potential employers’ Web sites to learn all you can.

That’s why Jon’s experience caught my eye. He was laid off some time ago and did what millions of others do. He put his resume up at Monster.com, Yahoo Hot Jobs, and career-builder.com.

The result?

[I received] nothing but scam-scheme-fraud job offers left and right (which I spent the better part of every day looking for information on these companies sending job offers), reported them to their security dept. and several other agencies, and nothing was ever done to these scams-schemes-frauds.

After some BBB complaints I actually received an email from Careerbuilder saying that they are not responsible for scams-schemes-frauds and it’s up to the people using their site to find out what’s a scam-scheme-fraud.

Didja catch that? CareerBuilder.com says it’s not their responsibility to determine what is a real job offer and what is not. Buyer beware. Or in this case, broke and maybe desperate job seeker beware.

What-the-hell ever.

Is it the responsibility of these sites to hold your hand through the process? No. They’re not your mother. You’re supposed to keep your brain turned on.

But any Web site offering a job-related service messes with the real lives of people. They have a moral obligation to either (1) do something to prevent fraudulent use of their service, or (2) post a big giant warning that says, If someone says they found your resume on CareerBuilder, it’s a scheme. Don’t waste your time!

Jon continues:

With that said, I also believe that any legitimate company offering customers a product/service should check anything out before they advertise/offer it to anybody. They however don’t, come to find out their claim is there is too many calls coming in to check everyone , but have a dept. for after the fact situations of scams-schemes-frauds posted on their site. Isn’t that a little backwards? So basically as long as any company/person pays to advertise on your site they can put up any scam-scheme-fraud job posting.

What Kind of Junk Jobs?

When you post your resume at public sites, you are in a sense posting a target to your back. Not always, of course. Not everyone. But far, far too many people receive scam invitations disguised as job offers.

Here’s the kind of crap that CareerBuilder and other large job sites enable:

This is where I was contacted by wealthdci.com-Angela Penbrook productions for rebate processing, which at the time this company didn’t show Angela Penbrooks name or had any ratings with the BBB or any other consumer agency. So I kept reading their site and it looked like something I could do and signed up, which is when I then found out it was one of Angela Penbrook Productions out of Irvine,CA. A quick search lead me to numerous complaints websites going back for years, I quickly felt a punch in the gut feeling and emailed for my 90-day money guarantee. No answer to several emails then I called and called only to receive Lie after Lie that we are processing your refund that never came, so days before my 90 days was up I called my credit card company faxed copies of my emails and their answers to them for proof. I was lucky and received my refund through the credit card company ,which after a few days they acknowledged their investigating dept actually has known about this Angela Penbrook Productions companies.

Jon’s experience with fraudulent “jobs” doesn’t stop there:

Then the emails/calls for representatives out of country jobs> “We heard you were looking for a home business type jobs, since you filled out an application to our service/product” type of stuff was overwhelming. Every day almost 40-70 emails/calls. First I forwarded some of them to the FCC, FTC, BBB, SEC , Attorney General, but none of them had any registered business names with any county clerks office-using mail pick up places as company address’s-etc. etc.

Most stopped and then I recieved an email from HiringMax (Fountain Valley,CA) saying Careerbuilder gave me your info and I am posting your resume on our site for companies to view, you should also stop by one of our work fairs too. I checked this company out, but there is no business registered by that name either with any LA/OC county clerks office for 2 different main offices listed on their website, plus they were using hotel work fairs address’s as one of their company addresses.

So I confronted Careerbuilder about them sending my resume info to HiringMax and was told by a manager they never did any such thing. Then I confronted this “Fred” at HiringMax and he kept claiming CB sent him my info. I asked him how can that be when they said they never did any such thing and my resume was off their site for 2 months? Then he got really rude and, long story short finally said he would take my info off their site, but after searching this company/person out more, I found Ripoff Report complaints from employees and customers that said he would send employees to other companies job fairs to get/sometimes steal people’s info from their lists.

We have seen too many complaints like this about CareerBuilder for me to just cast it off as one person’s bad experience. Monster.com and Yahoo Hot Jobs post plenty of junk jobs (ever search for “telecommuting?” Don’t.), but I’ve never heard of people being directly contacted by fraudsters who say they got their resume from Monster.

Just be extra cautious. As the number of people searching for work increases, so does the number of scum-sucking bottom feeders who are working hard to take your last grocery money from you.