September 2007

 

NRI staff regularly correspond by e-mail with their partners, funding agencies, fellow international development specialists, and other natural resources scientists and economists, almost always from their official @gre.ac.uk e-mail address (unless they are travelling on Institute business away from the office). Our staff or associates will never send you an e-mail that proposes an informal offer of a job or that seeks your involvement in the distribution of surplus funds. Any contract of employment for work on an NRI project would be formally issued by the University of Greenwich or by the project’s official funding agency. The unauthorized re-distribution of allegedly surplus or unclaimed funds is a criminal offence, commonly referred to as money-laundering, and NRI (like all other reputable organizations) would never be involved in such activity.

 

As most internet users will know, there is a major worldwide problem with scam e-mails distributed by criminals with the ultimate purpose of persuading the recipient: to pay substantial advance fees for non-existent benefits; or to release their bank or credit card details, thus allowing unauthorized withdrawals; or to provide personal information that will allow ‘identity theft’.

 

 

NRI is aware that its name and address is being used, together with the fictional or actual names of individuals, in a type of ‘company representative’ scam e-mail. The recipient of the e-mail is offered a part-time contract by an alleged former employee of NRI now acting as a freelance consultant, asking the recipient to receive cheques or money orders, pay them into his or her own account, retain a substantial commission, and then forward the remaining funds by untraceable money transfer to an account elsewhere. This is an illegal activity, and NRI and its staff or subcontractors have no connection with these fraudulent e-mails. You are strongly advised never to respond to such scam e-mails. You should delete the e-mail and not be tempted by its fraudulent promises. Before doing so, you may be able to cause some inconvenience to the originator by forwarding the e-mail to their Internet Service Provider as indicated by their ‘reply to’ address, with the username ‘abuse’ (e.g. abuse@yahoo.com, abuse@hotmail.com, etc).

 

Here are some tips for recognizing these ‘company representative’ scam e-mails:

• Does the message address you by name? A genuine job offer would do so. Scams commonly start ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, ‘Dear Friend’ or ‘From the Desk of...’.
• Does the message suggest that you would be required to encash cheques or money orders, and then to make payments by money order or wire transfer? Such transfers are impossible or difficult to trace subsequently. Ask yourself why the sender would want you to do this, unless it was for criminal money-laundering.
• Does the message offer you excessive financial rewards for little effort – typically 10% of the money transfers, possibly worth $1000 per week for 3 or 4 hours work? No genuine job offer would promise such rewards. These figures are intended to tempt you with the prospect of a full-time income for a half-day’s work per week.
• Does the message refer to a tight ‘deadline’? Scammers use this to rush the recipient into responding without thinking carefully about whether the proposal is genuine or legal.
• Does the message, whilst purporting to come from an individual working on behalf of a genuine reputable organization (e.g. NRI), actually come from a general e-mail address – e.g. @yahoo.com, @yahoo.co.uk, @hotmail.com, @gmail.com – rather than an institutional address? A real job offer from a reputable institution would always come from a corporate e-mail address.

Sources of further information:

• To see one of the typical scams purporting to be from NRI, visit http://jobscams.blogspot.com/2007/09/paying-part-time-job-offer_19.html: this site also carries useful advice scam e-mails and maintains an archive of similar reported scams.
• To check whether a particular e-mail may be a scam, copy and paste it into the automatic checking system at http://www.scamomatic.com. You will receive a report that identifies any suspicious elements.
• Go to http://www.repository.izone.me.uk/ for a continuously updated list of reported scam e-mails, listing the latest ones on the top page (by subject, originator and an extract of the message) and maintaining a searchable archive for the past year.

To protect yourself from fraud:

• Never respond to these scam e-mails
• Never provide the sender with any banking or credit card details
• Never be tempted by illegal money-laundering schemes