While unemployment rates are getting worse and worse (I a victim of unemployment too) some organized (and not so organized) electronic criminals resort to harvesting CVs exploiting the desperation of unemployed people and the lack of attention caused by their eagerness to send CVs out there, in hopes of a job.

I can do nothing more than alert people to be careful where they send their CVs as identity theft is on the rise.  Waking up one day and finding debt on your name isn’t a nice thing.  Or discover you are employed in Africa!!

Having a look at this example:
http://www.cyprusjobswebsite.com/jobs/job-vacancy-2 we can see how it is carefully crafted to attract the desperate and trick them to sending their CVs.  The Achilles heel of these attacks though is the destination email address of the recruiter.  Here the email is Email:info_hardyoilgas@yahoo.com .  I added the email here in hopes that some spider will pick it up and spam it relentlessly

They use legit company names, and in some instances i saw legit vacancies, but the emails are always not real.  They are either yahoo, gmail etc emails or in some cases emails belonging to domains bought that are similar to ones of actual companies.

In this case the site hosting the advert failed to make the appropriate check, and spot the email address.  I took the liberty of contacting one of these companies, but actually contacted the legit company asking them if they had any actual vacancies.  The response was rather disappointing (but expected) when the london based company said that they have fallen victims of this attack, but police in London did nothing to put an end to this and help protect people falling for it, protecting the company itself and its name from being involved in this scheme.

If the crime is small enough in impact no one will bother doing anything about it.  So the recipe for success? Many little crimes apparently such as this one and the police will do nothing!  Ofcourse such crimes are hard to address as there is nothing much the police can do about them.

Responsibility is with us, being careful where we send our CVs and with recruitment websites making sure they scrutinize ads before posting them.

Good luck!