I am signed up with Indeed dot com to search for a part time job to fill the hours and the bank account, and an offer from a company called Karp Protection popped appeared. I sent off my Indeed resume and got this:
" My Name is Victoria Christopher i am the Hiring Manager.
Thank you for your application i would like to inform you that now we have two shifts available Day and night which one would like to Join Day or Night ? And please send your replies to my Personal eMail id Allison.Cooper36 at eclouds.live So that i can Contact you directly.
Shifting Hours are 9 Am to 3 PM And 3 Pm to 9 PM.
Salary range $25-$31 ( will be decided after interview ).
Thank you,
Allison Cooper.
Hiring Manager."
Instead of using that address I responded through Indeed, but I still wonder, What is “eclouds.live”?
So I sent off my shift preference and got this back:
" Thank you, again, for taking the time to apply to this role. I, May Need to Look at Your, Background History/Credit Scores and This will also include your Criminal Records.
Because the Data and the other information we will provide you is Costly And Company Can not take any chances.
Visit www.CreditsCheckup dot com ‘it doesn’t Cost don’t worry’ When you are done with the reports Please Send me your Reports Screenshot+ Your Resume and Contact number in One mail Please.
Thank you.
Allison Cooper."
So I moused over that supposed credit report link and “linkmail.live” popped up. What is “linkmail.live”?
All links broken by Yours Truly, and you don’t need to tell me that it smells of scam. I am just wondering about those “.live” links.
Did you do any research on “Karp Protection”? I googled that so you don’t have to. It appears to be a German company. Their web site is all in German. That might suffice to explain the bad grammar you got. There were also some hits for a Karp Protection company in America, but it wasn’t clear if that’s the same company. They seem to be in the health care business somehow.
The first response on the Indeed site had some German words mixed into it, as if it was only half translated. I did a check on the German “Karp Protection” using an English translation and, while their website looks slick, there is very little solid info on the company. It then went to the Dun And Bradstreet page on this company, which told me it had a total of two employees and assets of $135,000. Couple that with the fact that “Victoria Christopher” greets me in the letter, but “Allison Cooper” signs off, and the scamminess is pretty much proven. I was just wondering where those links would go and/or what they would do to my computer.
The closest thing I immediately found was this link, seemingly from a job-listing site. The jobs listed are in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, and all have the same job title “Covid Temperature Screener”.
Strangely, a search with DuckDuckGo turns up very different hits than a Google search.
Isn’t the scam regarding the credit search website and not the URLs used for the emails from the phishers? My understanding is the scam is the credit check is not free and you’ll be asked to pay a fee to get the report.
I don’t know - it sounded more like a phishing attempt, to me - think about what sort of information you would have to give for a credit report. But mainly I was just making a silly pun on “Karp”.
There’s all sorts of alternatives to .com .net and .org nowadays, and .live is just one of them. I block emails from nearly every one of those new top level domains (TLDs) because I was getting flooded with spam from all manner of them, including .surf .bid .work .download .top .xyz .club and many others. Even .biz is usually a red flag, but there are a few legit companies that use it.