In the past 24 hours I've received dozens of phone calls from people across the country inquiring about an "Account Manager" position with my company. I had no one idea what they were talking about.
This morning I got a voice mail from a very nice gentleman in St. Louis informing me that'd he'd received an email from "Crey Design Inc." about this particular job opening. Attached to the email was an employment packet. The packet contained some forms requesting bank account and routing numbers, drivers license number, and a slew of other personal information that anyone with a shred of common sense would never disclose so frivolously.
In the email there was a link to www.creydesigninc.com. Crey Design is a graphic and web design company that coincidentally uses my same business address. Their fax number, which by the way is disconnected, is my old business phone number from years ago.
Needless to say, Crey Design Inc. is not on the up and up.
Later today I got a call from a contact at the Arizona Better Business Bureau. She'd gotten some calls about Crey Design, and since she knows me and knows about my company Creybot, called to see if I knew about this.
Crey Design was the name I used years ago when I first started freelancing. It was a separate entity from Creybot, yet I still use the same address. And of course the names are similar. People have been connecting the dots between Crey Design Inc. and Creybot, and though Crey Design has long since been abandoned, there's still some traces of it left online (a BBB listing, local business directories, etc.).
I learned from my BBB contact that I'm certainly not alone, as many businesses in Arizona have experienced this same thing. Most of these fraudulent websites have been traced back to registrars in Malaysia. These folks are looking for inactive businesses, then using whatever information they can find to create phony websites. Then they post job openings through legitimate employment sites.
When a job seeker contacts them, they do the back and forth, tell them they've been "hired," then send an employment packet requesting all sorts of sensitive information.
Luckily, most people are smart enough to see the red flags. But there are those that fall for these scams, and that's what the perpetrators count on. It's basically a classic fishing scheme – throw the line out there and see who bites.
Legally speaking there's not much you can do about this. For what it's worth, I sent emails to both the domain registrar in Malaysia and the hosting company in Luxembourg as well as a couple internet fraud organizations. The BBB also added a disclaimer to the Crey Design listing informing interested parties as to what's going on. Hopefully that should help curb the incoming calls.
And seriously, that Crey Design site is built using tables. I would never do that.
About the Author
Chris Reynolds is a web designer, developer, search strategist, photographer and videographer living in Scottsdale, AZ. An Arizona native and U.S. Navy veteran, Chris has been working in the digital space for over 6 years.
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