Victim Location 64145
Type of a scam Employment
On June 5, Direct Staffing Services contacted me on a job through careerbuilder.com. I first had a brief phone screen for the position with someone calling herself Kim. I was then emailed the position description by another person who was refereed to as the hiring lead (or something similar). The hiring lead called himself Chris Major. After a phone call with Chris and some back and forth emails I was asked to sign up for a scrum master course to show that I was actively pursuing a CMS certification in order to quality as a candidate for a position at Verizon.
Chris sent me an email with 3 certification options that Verizon supposedly used for their staff. 2 options were in person and none of their classes were near me. The other was an online option. There is no such thing as an online scrum master certification.
I was urged to sign up for the online certification at $599 to meet the timing needs. There was a great sense of urgency placed on me to move forward quickly. Felt something was wrong found the name of the website for the online certification -https://www.courseinfotech.com was tied to a scam. I called him back and told him this was most likely a scam. He assured me it wasn’t, that the person that posted this as a scam just didn’t get the job and was upset. Surprisingly Chirs agreed that I could register for a CSM through the scrum master alliance, which is the legitimate certification association. I needed the CSM anyway so I registered through the scrum master alliance and sent proof of my registration to Chris.
I then did some a more thorough web search and found the ScamPulse.com posting staging that the company didn’t exist and was a scam. I don’t expect to hear back from them again. Since they don’t have any more information about me than they could gleam from my resume profile I am probably not any worse off. However in my haste, I could have easily assumed that something changed allowing online CMS certification classes, missed the signs that this was a scam, and pulled the trigger on the online course.