A couple of weeks ago, we made the announcement about a MeloTel imposter who was fraudulently luring job seekers with a bogus job posting involving our company. In our blog about the incident, we revealed that we received a call from a job seeker who was wondering why we weren’t responding to messages about our job postings. Naturally, this took us by surprise as we had no job postings listed.
The con artist, who had the audacity of scamming people under the name “Angel”, placed the ad on Indeed.com. Upon learning about this job posting, we endeavoured to have it taken down. We succeeded but then found out that this Angel person was continuing to communicate with would-be candidates through email. As a result, we felt it necessary to alert any and everyone to these fraudulent actions via our website and telephone lines.
We posted the following important announcement on our site.
“MeloTel has become aware of an elaborate fraud attempt against job seekers as fraudsters created a fake job postings impersonating MeloTel. We have not posted on Indeed for a Customer Service Representative. We ask that anyone affected by this scam immediately stop all communications with Angel, as they are impersonating us, and are attempting to fraud you. We have reported this to local law enforcement and doing our best to have this investigated.”
As mentioned, we were successful in having the Indeed job posting removed two days after it was originally posted. Nevertheless, we received approximately 15 phone calls from people who had been communicating with “Angel” under the impression he was offering a legitimate job position.
Unfortunately, this situation has not been fully remedied to our satisfaction.
With each day that passes, it appears as if the scam gets bigger. “Angel” went from saying that he was no longer hiring a customer support representative, as the original ad indicated, but had moved on to hiring a personal assistant for MeloTel’s Founder and CEO, John Meloche. The job description went so far as to suggest that John needed someone to handle his personal and business errands during his/her spare time.
With this job posting, the fraudster has obtained full names, addresses and phone numbers of innocent people looking for work. Apparently, once a person applies for the position of John’s personal assistant, he/she is scheduled for a job interview but is told that he/she will go through a “trial”.
The scam goes pretty deep.
A cheque, in the amount of $3,800.45, is sent to the unsuspecting victim through FedEx with a tracking number. It’s a legitimate cheque containing signatures from a Vancouver-based law office. These cheques were actually lost some time ago forcing the firm to shut down the bank account. They too are being victimized by this scam.
The scammer asks the victim to deposit the cheque and keep his/her pay of $500.00, but then use the rest of the money to pay past due bills for MeloTel’s CEO. As you can tell, this situation has sadly escalated with each passing day, forcing us to alert authorities. MeloTel never has and never will sit idly by playing victim to any scam. We would also never participate in such illegal activity. We hope that we’ve helped you to avoid becoming a victim of fraud yourself.
