never trust kijiji, or: how i got involved in an international money laundering scheme
As you know, I've been job hunting. As you can guess from the title, SHIT GOT WEIRD recently. This is the first most of you had heard of this because I didn't want to "jinx" anything back when I thought this was legit. Anyway, I'm copy/pasting from an email I sent other people because this is loooong. I was going to flock this to save face, but on second thought I'm going to leave it open so other people can be advised from my experiences.
K SO I replied to this job posting looking for an "office administrator", which is the kind of work I've been looking for. It was on Kijiji so like, you know, standard personal-ads type place. NOT THE HIGHEST OF QUALITY, lesson learned there!
Anyway, I sent a resume + cover letter, and a week later or whatever I got an email from someone with more deets on the job. It's a furniture company from the US opening more outlets and they're opening one in Canada so they need an admin assistant to run orders + take calls and do some data entry. 3 weeks of training to make sure you're suitable, then the store opens, etc. There was a website for this company that looked legit, and when you Google they come up on several customer review sites, usually with bad reviews LOL.
So I was all "yes okay I am interested sounds great". I also asked a few questions, like when would training me, are they still selectin from a pool of candidates, etc.
I got another email asking for a bit more information "for HR", including my street address because I don't have that on my resume. But I also know a street address is semi-standard for resumes so I'm like, whatever, and sent it back.
So a few days after that I get an email that's like "okay so I'm going to send the first order for you to process!!" It also does not answer any of the questions I had asked. At this point it starts pinging that things are pretty weird, but I am also worried about jeopardizing what COULD BE an okay job with decent pay + benefits (which was mentioned in the first email). So I was like "um, okay, but can you clarify some stuff" and asked more questions.
A few days after that, I got another email that's like "OKAY SO I JUST TALKED TO A CLIENT AND WE'RE SENDING THE ORDER TO YOU TO CASH YOU'LL GET TRAVELLERS CHEQUES" and by this point I know stuff is SERIOUSLY WEIRD. So I told my dad (I hadn't told anyone about it up to this point because I didn't want to ~jinx myself) what was going on, and emailed the guy being like "what? why would I cash the cheques into my bank? Can you explain?" That was on Friday. I have received no answers.
BUT this afternoon I did get something in the mail, from MANCHESTER???, containing $2kUSD in travellers cheques. No return address. All addressed to me. HA HA HA OKAY.
So my dad and I did a bit more googling, and I guess there's some kind of international money laundering ring that does this and targets students? GR8.
anyway so I guess we are going to the police tomorrow.