I don’t know if anyone else has posted about anything like this but I wanted to put the information out there and spread the word to get something done about what might be a new type of scam cropping up since I’ve looked around and have seen very little information about it.
Since encountering this scam personally, I've tried to report job postings popping like it up on my alerts almost on a daily basis but here should be one that you can view as an example: https://tinyurl.com/linkedinscams (shortened the URL because good grief LinkedIn's URLs are stupid long). Most of the ones I dealt with were for Shoppers Drug Mart, despite the fact that they will likely be contacting you as a completely different company . For me, it was under Sitel. This is one I managed to find that's still up is even more suspect than the others though. 'amazon td' isn't even capitalized...
I'm guessing anyone that applies get's a standard email like I did telling them to download the app Telegram to proceed with their interview since they have been 'shortlisted'. From there it's a weird interaction since everything happens via text. You answer questions, get a bunch of copy-pasta text blurbs and I assume regardless of how you do on the 'interview' you're rewarded the position. From there they go over how you'll be working from home and that you'll need to be purchasing equipment which they will be covering. A list of items is provided and they say they continue the new hire process tomorrow morning.
After that, they send out an 'Employment Offer Letter' which somewhat looks official but when you look closer is just full of sketchy details. Then a 'cheque' is emailed and instructions are to print it out and to use your mobile banking app to cash it, even though a cheque on a printed page is not a valid cheque in the slightest (the cheque itself is also super sketch). Then the main scam kicks in: once they 'confirm' the money has been deposited into the new employee's account they explain that they must now retrieve $500 in gift cards for various work and time-tracking software that needs to be installed on the equipment that will be shipped out. This is done by them mainly asking for just apple and steam gift cards, though the software they give as examples make little to no sense since they are not available for purchase on either of those stores (Quickbooks being one of them, but some people may not know that). They will request pictures of receipts for 'company expense' record keeping, along with pictures of the back of the cards.
Finally, they will ask to have the remaining of the cheque balance be e-transferred to their 'vendor', who is really just a gmail account, which is similar to every other email correspondence in the scam thus far. Looking up the company Sitel, and it is a supposedly legitimate business. These scammers are likely running this thing under the guise of Sitel since every bit of information they gave was completely contradictory to what the official site gave.
The next day they will claim that the initial amount for the equipment was not enough to cover what was needed and the vendor needs more to upgrade a few things, but they will be issuing a new 'cheque'. And thus the scam continues.
Since this incident has occurred, I have filed what reports as soon as I was able and collected every piece of information from what happened, but their response was a bit discouraging since it amounted to: "there's only so much we can do with these sorts of things."
So I'm hoping that by posting this all here maybe there is more that can be done. If anyone is curious about what some of the documentation looks like, please feel free to reach out to me.
Thank you for reading.