LifeLock Blog

It’s usually a good thing when jobseekers’ interviewers says they’re excited about a prospective candidate’s resume, and want to move forward with background and credit checks. Most desperate jobseekers would happily give out any information the interviewer asked for at that point.

Fortunately Denise Crawford was a little paranoid when she got the request for her Social Security number. Instead of sending her information on, she contacted her state’s attorney general’s office and talked to them about the request.

“That shows a lot of red flags,” said Hugh Williams, the identity theft administrator in the Office of the Attorney General. “Most businesses that are going to run a credit report are going to do that on their own,” he said.

Crawford’s reaction to all this was predictable: she’s afraid now to apply for any other jobs over the Internet, but at the same time she knows that’s nearly the only way to find a job these days. Worse yet, the scammer has her resume and email address.

Other tips to jobseekers:

• Don’t give out personal information over the Internet unless you initiated the contact.
• Research any companies that you’re applying to. If they’re not on the Internet, steer clear.
• Be sure the hiring company is emailing from a their company’s URL. Example: humanresources@hiringcompanysname.com.
• Misspellings and poor grammar aren’t usually found in email messages sent by hiring managers.

It’s a brutal market for jobseekers, not just because of a dearth of jobs, but because there are so many scammer taking advantage of jobseekers.

Tags: Add new tag, avoid identity theft, Denise Crawford, LifeLock discount code

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under identity theft risks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.