Until this morning, when I got this email:
Dear Roland,
I recently viewed your resume and would like you to consider applying for a Marketing Advice position with our company. We are WorldVoice-News-Expert, the fastest growing online newspaper in the world today. WorldVoice-News-Expert is ranked in the top ½ percent of most trafficked websites on the Internet. With over 3,000 reporters in the United States and a projected 60,000 Reporters worldwide (7,500 in the United States alone) by year-end 2007, WorldVoice-News-Expert's future continues to look extremely bright.
We are currently launching an advice section, which allows our readers to ask advice from experts in a wide variety of topics. We feel you are qualified to be an expert in the Marketing Advice Section. Marketing Advice experts answer questions about marketing, advertising, public relations, sales, and design.
Starting pay for our experts is $30 per hour (pay can be increased after 90 days based on performance and reader feedback). This position can be full-time or part-time, but experts must commit to a minimum of 12 hours per week. Experts work from their home and can select their own schedule. Each expert must have a computer with online access.
This is a tremendous opportunity to work from home and make a top income or a great supplemental part time income while providing a valuable service to our readers. You will answer questions via text chat to a truly international reader base. Our technology insures that you will only be presented with questions that are in your field of expertise. We offer our experts the following:
- Top Pay Starting at $30 per hour
- Insurance Benefits
- Tuition Reimbursement
- Rapid Advancement Opportunities
- Student Loan Reimbursement Assistance
If you are interested in being considered as a WorldVoice-News-Expert, click the link below and complete the application. Once you have completed the application, I will contact you to schedule an interview. (If the link does not work you may copy and paste the address in your browser)
http://opportunitieswvn.com/experts.aspx?A=5932733
I look forward to reviewing your application soon :)
Michelle Thompson
WorldVoice-News-Experts
Wow, I thought. An exciting job offer to tide me over while I find my career path in New York! Except thanks to three years of marriage to an extremely suspicious Jew-ish woman (she's only half Jew, so that makes her Jew... ish) my Spidey senses started tingling.
There's an old maxim: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Which is exactly what WorldVoice-News-Experts sounded like. So I did some research.
Fortunately, it didn't take long to find the truth thanks to Scam.com.
It turns out WorldVoice-News-Experts are an internet site specialising in something called "Phishing."
Phishing is the term used for scamming somebody out of their personal details. If you clicked on the link to WorldVoice-News-Expert's website, you'd be asked to fill in an application, which contains enough information about you to be worth money to marketing companies or even identity thieves. Those poor saps who filled in an online application wouldn't find job offers or paycheques flooding in. Just lots and lots of spams, adverts and intrusive sales calls.
WorldVoice-News-Experts are slightly more sophisticated than most spamming websites. Their offer is just tangible enough to appeal to aspiring writers and journalists (such as myself.) They don't offer millions of dollars (like the clearly fraudulant Nigerian 419 scams) and a cursory glance at their website makes it look just about legitimate.
What's more, they've done some clever internet marketing to make it look like the bad publicity their organisation receives (from websites like Scam.com) comes from jealous 'internet terrorists' out to corrupt the 'good' name of a 'legitimate' company. Check out this website they posted.
What annoys me most about WorldVoice-News-Experts is that they prey on perhaps the most vulnerable of internet marks. The hopeful ones.
Fraudsters like Publish America have been exploiting hopeful and aspiring writers for decades. The desire to succeed - to makes that break into the big time - sometimes blinds really smart people into making really dumb decisions. WorldVoice-News-Experts are just the latest crooks to try and profit off people's dreams.
If you get an email from WorldVoice-News-Experts - bin it. They're not worth the effort.
1 comment:
I joined World Voice about 1-2 years ago. I wrote one article on health care and I received a check for $.75. You supposedly got paid for how many hits you had on your article. You got paid from the advertisers on the site. I was going to school at the time so I didn't pursue it. Any questions e-mail me at jpoole6670@charter.net. If you are looking for a job one of the best is indeed.com which pools all of the job search engines on one site.
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