The most shocking element of OP's story is that he never actually got interviewed by a real person. He filled out a questionaire, received no feedback from it other than "You're hired at 12.5% more than you're asking". This to me is the biggest red flag of all leading up to the actual "ask" to cash the check and send funds.
It seems odd to get a job for $90k /yr without ever meeting someone from the company. Even if that actually wasn't a scam, I would avoid taking a job for a company like that. How good are your co-workers going to be if they are just hired based on a text-based questionaire and a prayer?
Odd but not unheard of. I got a job offer from Boeing sight unseen based on a cover letter and resume. When I asked, they did give me a site visit (though I didn't ultimately take the offer).
I know it may seem odd in a world of leetcode interviews etc. but, if you're hiring a bunch of new grad engineers for one of the aerospace boom cycles, you can save a lot of effort by just hiring a bunch of people out of schools that pass some filter.
unless its your very close friend or family, don't launder money. i think this is a life lesson we learn in middle school and grow up to think adults are more trustworthy
* The scammer keeps the focus on the upsides (job, office supplies) which are good but not unrealistic.
* The scammer is keeping the victim overwhelmed with interviews, paperwork, training, etc. The actual scam part is a small percentage of the victim's focus. This is classic misdirection.
* The scammer gets the victim to commit a lot of time and energy. Loss aversion and social norms stops people calling out slightly suspicious activity immediately.
* The big one is that the scammer drip feeds pieces so that the victim doesn't see the big picture. It's not like the scammer lays out the scheme on day one. They start with the company providing supplies (not suspicious), bureaucratic fumbling meaning the process changes (understandable), the new hire submitting the order themselves (ok), etc. Each step is logical and only slightly peculiar in isolation. Once the victim is comfortable with each step they are fed the next lie.
The last one works because even if people are suspicious of new information, once they've decided something is true they rarely reconsider their position. In this case the scammer got the victim to believe that the job was real, and the scammer was a legitimate HR person before introducing the scam element. If you believe the company is real, why would you imagine the check is fake? If you truly believe the check is real, how does the transfer risk your own money? They build a foundation of trust by layering a lot of little lies.
For example, when I company I worked for sent me on a business trip, I was supposed to buy the flight ticket using my own money, then bring them then receipt, and then they would pay me the money back. Why couldn't they buy the flight ticket themselves instead? They knew when and where I am traveling; they were the ones deciding that. It would be easier for one HR person to buy 5 tickets at once whenever one of the teams went to a business trip, than for 5 developers to buy the tickets individually and figure out the rules.
This totally felt like a scam (use your own money to buy something we want to buy, and you only have our word that will get the money later back), except it didn't make sense, because it was a large international company employing thousands of people, and I have already worked there for months. And yes, it was perfectly legit. Just needlessly complicated and weird.
So the fact that a company does something weird and needlessly complicated doesn't necessarily make it a scam. It's just likely a scam when they do it before paying you the first salary.
I suspect with a small firm that doesn't necessarily have a dedicated travel "guy" it probably simplifies things letting people book their own flights.
For some people, airline choice is a big deal. For some cities, you might even pick the wrong airport (i. e. if the person has an easier commute to Newark or Laguardia than JFK). Not to mention scheduling (maybe someone wants to travel the "day before" because of risk of too-tight scheduling).
OTOH, maybe it's simpler for "local team all in one city" versus "remote workers being herded to a single event".
For one thing even if the company never reimbursed you - it wasn’t an outright scam, you did get a flight. The scam scenario you are literally just sending money to a scammer - with the extra flourish of getting a fake check.
What you say about expensing is not unusual and there a number of reasons for it. It does offload the onus of correctly making reservations, putting in KTIN and immigration info on you. And then the big one is that I get all the travel card benefits (points). I even prefer it this way.
This is no more inherently scammish than my relationship with my credit card company or any time one agrees to pay later (which is the norm of how businesses with supply chains operate).
The point is there’s no need to use some ill defined concept of weird. Where is the money going and what is the purpose? If someone is giving you an unbacked check and requesting a wire transfer to themselves it’s a scam.
While agreeing to be paid later for an unrelated good or service has some amount of risk it isn’t a scam.
And there are clear benefits to booking your own plane tickets.
a) you’re buying tickets for someone else
b) that scam company also owns the airline (or if you’re buying from a third part online agency)
Otherwise how could you get scammed? Haha we tricked you into going to Atlanta but didn’t monetarily benefit from it at all!
Sorry, what middle school child learned that? None that I know.
This was before the internet was really a thing, too, so the same basic scam has been around for a long long time.
I don't! They aren't! I wasn't! Nobody does that because they cost (at least then) several dollars.
The point of my anecdote was you use a bank check once and you learn about scams and laundering money, so you don't "run around casually" using them.
Probably there are more high schoolers "running around casually" with credit cards than there were 25-30 years ago, but in any case I didn't have one.
I certainly never again tried to use a check that wasn't for an exact amount.
By the way, some people do or did use personal checks at the grocery store and get cash back - I don't know if you can still do that and I never have tried it, but it used to be a thing.
There's also some mental concept where people already got started or went so far, and subconsciously don't want to believe they've been had, so keep going. I'm sure there's a name for it, I can't be bothered to look up. It's why romance scams are so common, and also why that McDonald's manager undressed that employee, for example. Fascinating, but sad.
Which would be completely unbelievable if there wasn't security footage of the whole thing!
> Summers also sued McDonald's and was awarded $1 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in compensatory damages.
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3688563
> Nix was sentenced in March, 2006 to five years in prison.
> He pleaded guilty to sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and unlawful imprisonment.
> Donna Summers was fired after the incident.
> She was charged with unlawful imprisonment, and was sentenced to probation after entering an Alford plea — a type of guilty plea in which a person does not admit guilt, but acknowledges the evidence is sufficient for a conviction.
> She broke off her engagement to Nix after viewing the surveillance tapes.
> Summers also sued McDonald's and was awarded $1 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in compensatory damages.
> After two hours of deliberations, Stewart was found not guilty on all charges.
Justice is a funny thing, isn't it?
>"Everything is by the book," he explained. "This is how you serve it. This is exactly how you do it. You follow the book — you're OK. I believe he picked fast food restaurants because he knew, once you got them away from that book, once it was something outside the manual or the procedures, they would be lost."
This woman should be in jail, criminal negligence is a thing.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
The real life story is pretty sickening: an ~8 hour ordeal starting with the CDP saying "we think you have drugs" and forcibly sending an 18 year old girl to the hospital for an x-ray, in handcuffs, where she is instead invasively strip searched (with the CDP and hospital staff in audience). Nothing is found so they eventually let her go.
The court basically ruled that:
- The CDP did its job "correctly". They just need to think you did something wrong to detain you and force you to accept medical interventions.
- This was the wrong way to sue: the plaintiff must seek state-law tort action against the doctor for malpractice.
I can only hope that additional legal remediation brought some kind of justice and relief. Maybe this is yet another example of how contorted US law practice can be.
I'm not holding my breath.
Someone tried to scam me once by taking over the Instagram account of a hotel and baiting me with a discount. That by itself is not a problem, it could be a legit offer. Their intentions became obvious when I randomly got a message with a 2 factor code and they asked me for the number.
Criminals must necessarily violate social rules in order to carry out their crimes. A robber on the street must close the distance against the victim in order to get in attack range. In my case, the unacceptable behavior was asking me about information that was not only secret but also useless to anyone but me. Recognizing these violations of social norms and enforcing firm boundaries is necessary to defend against these people. People who don't understand what a 2 factor code is will not recognize that it is unacceptable behavior for another person to ask for one and will see no problem with revealing the secret.
Once you've decided something is true, it's easy to dismiss all sorts of signals that maybe it isn't.
But no one likes to think about this version of confirmation bias/the bias you were talking about, somehow.
I've fallen victim to a scammer as well (paid rent to a "landlord" who it turns out didn't actually own the place). It sucks, but I don't think it's something to be ashamed of. Our society is built on trust, and some people exploit that.
I almost got scammed by this as well. But it felt strange to me that there was no actual person I needed to meet to complete the rental agreement. And then when they asked me to wire the money I knew it was a scam.
That said, receiving a personal check from a company of any size should properly set off a lot of alarm bells.
Looking to make use of her degree, she was excited to get a job offer doing remote work as an office coordinator. She has a dog so working from home was a plus, and $25/hr instead of $16/hr doing retail was a big raise.
She not only lost $3000 from the scam check, she also lost her old job, having given two weeks notice and didn't realize it was a scam until she was gone. The thing that pained her the most was the shame of having been scammed.
Although some red flags were there, her main blind spot was the disbelief that scammers would go to so much effort to (a) set up an entire website for the fake company, (b) were willing to spend hours in the fake interview, and (c) having her do two weeks of "training" courses while they waited for the laptop and other things she bought made it it cross country into their hands.