This scam will sound familiar to domain name owners.
Dan Primack of Fortune has an interesting story about executives falling for a scam that’s very similar in operation to the domain name appraisal scam.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the domain name appraisal scam gets domain owners to pay for a domain name appraisal with the carrot that someone wants to pay them big bucks for their domain.
The scam Primack discovered is similar in nature but involves job resumes. And it’s much, much more sophisticated. It involves a sham venture capital firm and recruiting firm.
It starts with an email from someone at a fake venture capital firm. The sender informs an executive that they’re in the late stages of acquiring a company in a similar field to the recipient. They are firing the current executive team and are interested in hiring the recipient.
If the recipient responds with interest, they get a follow-up from the recruiting firm. The victim is then asked to send their resume.
Once the resume is received, they get a response that the resume isn’t readable by the computer and suggests that the victim optimize his or her resume in the ATS format. The email helpfully includes a link to a service that charges about $100 to do so.
Once the victim pays for the ATS translation, the recruiter disappears. They are told the acquisition fell through.
Sound familiar? The goal is to dangle a carrot out in front of someone. A big domain sale. A big job opportunity. Paying $50 for a domain appraisal or $100 for a resume conversion is a small price to pay for such a big opportunity, right?
This is why it works, and why the domain appraisal scam has been going on for a decade.
Joseph Peterson says
Why is it that law enforcement and civil lawsuits don’t pursue these fraudsters?
Is there any barrier here? Or are we simply looking at thousands of victims, each of whom thinks the harm is too small or too embarrassing to take action?
Coordinating action is troublesome. But at some stage, we ought to do something about this problem.
Mike says
Joseph;
The fraudsters tend to act from geographies where legal remedies have a low likelihood of reaching. This is a cash grab and vanish as opposed to along duration making it even more difficult to locate and deal with fraudsters. Best defense lies in increasing awareness unfortunately
Sulabh Sharma says
Really nice post. Even I receive tons of emails regularly. Either I send those emails to spam or just delete it. But some time I am worried about few emails if I just delete a email with good intention.
The emails are not only about appraisal, but also domain expiration, domain purchase scam and many more.
John says
I would be happy to pay the $500 appraisal fee and will do that right away. Before I do that, however, my company requires that I receive a refundable $100 negotiation fee from you in order to proceed.
C.S. Watch says
Awful.
The dashboard of ATS Resume’s affiliate program is on LeadDyno.com (the affiliate program SaaS), and makes no reference to what the commission per lead is. No affiliate marketer would put in any work without knowing the commission fee.
Then there’s the nervous wittering added to the top of ATSOptimizedResumes.com’s page, under ‘notice to customers’…. Rubbish. LeadDyno.com handles the affiliate txns for ATS Resume, they’re integrated with Shopify, and no Paypal payouts are made to affiliates until leads convert to purchase. So all that is needed is the victim’s txn info to know exactly who got the payout for any affiliate lead.
That affiliate program SaaS, LeadDyno of Sacramento, requires no terms and conditions agreement to be in place to shepherd/control affiliate marketer behavior. Contracts and restrictions are left at the discretion of randos like ATS Resumes, who use nothing. (LeadDyno, 1-10 employees, founders Carson Gross and Brett Owens, whom it seems is the author of the ‘big fat check’ verbiage on their site.)
https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/#&panel1-1
Rohit Sharma says
I did some fun with one of these so called domain lawyer and published a story. Interesting thing was he believed that I did pay them. Check out here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/domain-sales-scam-story-rohit-sharma?trk=mp-author-card