Bamboozled

Beware of looking for a job on Craigslist. What you didn’t already know that? Well, here’s a lesson for all those thinking they can find the dream job by looking in the biggest ad on the ‘net.

I wrote another painfully sincere e-mail to Hillary Newman saying that I was smart and hardworking and had two months free for the project, and I pretty much figured that was the end of it —time to sulk and drink again—except that four days later, I got an e-mail inviting me to join the company as a member of their legal team (duties, according to the e-mail, included negotiating and drafting contracts, as well as doing some other things I did not know how to do).

In this e-mail, I got an employment contract, too, reiterating the $14,000-a-month salary. The first month’s pay would come in two-and-a-half weeks. The contract was between me and two companies—one called the Global Speculator, located in McLean, Va., and another called the Alulim Willow Property Group whose headquarters, the contract said, were in India.

[...]This lack of information was disquieting, but the Global Speculator team was reassuring: lawyers, researchers, writers, computer programmers, designers, administrators, executive assistants, and the one mathematician named Kermit, some of whom had been working since early June, when I first saw the Craigslist ad. And I trusted the wisdom of the group: There were almost 80 people working on this project. That is a lot of people, too many for everyone to be as silly and desperate as me. Surely someone in the group had a good reason to be there, and I thought I’d ride along on their coattails. Plus, one of my new co-workers was, it turned out, someone I’d worked with on Saipan, and I marveled at this reassuring coincidence; I knew this guy was smart, and if he was willing to believe that this was a legitimate enterprise then perhaps it really was. Unfortunately, I think he might have applied some of that reasoning to me.

[...]We never heard from Gerald Edward again.

I did continue to hear from my fellow dupees, who expressed a panoply of sad and predictable emotions: hope that our project would continue and our pay would eventually come, shock that this had fallen apart after all the work we’d done, fear that our personal information—our Social Security numbers and bank account information—would be sold to terrorists. People said they were really suffering. At least one woman, an executive assistant in the Ozarks, had bought a car with the promised money. A writer in St. Louis had quit one job and turned down another based on this job’s excellent pay.

The group finally found their collective senses and went to investigating Gerald and the reason for the scam. They found that Gerald was really John McDonald and that he’d been convicted of securities fraud years before. Even when some of the group decided to move on, Arin continued looking for the reason “why”. The answer finally came in August of that year.
(I’ve decided to let you read the article for the final answer.)

Aha! The hilarity! Poor John must have been so let down.

Arin was so hoping to find that dream job, that the Craigslist ad seemed Heaven sent. The research she did do to find out the particulars about this company sent up a lot of red flags that she simply ignored. In the end, no identities were actually stolen, but they easily could have been. So the next time you’re thinking of all of your poor performance reviews and thinking of seeking employment through Craigslist, think of Arin and the 79 other people that did the work and never got paid.

Do your research. If it smells fishy, it probably is. $14k a month seems good, sure, but if you never get that $14k, what’s the point?

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