Victim Location 83709
Type of a scam Employment
I applied for an administrative assistant position in Boise, ID at Sletten Construction Company through indeed.com. Soon after I received an email telling me to email my resume to an email address to continue the conversation about potential employment. I did so and quickly received back an email from a man introducing himself as Shawn Warner, a sub-contractor at the company, although the email address didn’t have his name anywhere in it. I did a brief background check and found that there is indeed a man named Shawn Warner working at Sletten and is a Senior Vice President. He told me that the position had been filled but had an opening for his personal assistant and wondered if I’d be interested. I responded yes and we began what was sort of an interview process, which really was just a stream of his hoping he wouldn’t regret using me as his PA and me requesting more info. Red flags included improper grammar usage, odd wording and phrases, very late hours for email correspondence, and suspiciously quick response times for someone that looked like he should be a very busy man. He gave me his phone number to continue discussing the position but didn’t give me any answers when I asked what kind of work I’d specifically be doing. This continued for about 24 hours until he told me the first task he needed from me. He would send me a check that I would deposit into my back account and go and buy presents for an orphanage. Seemed like an odd first task as a personal assistant for a Senior Vice President at a construction company. He emailed me the check and as soon as I looked at it it looked wrong. The amount was for $1980.00 and all the writing looked like it was copied and pasted, and was dated the day before we even communicated for the first time. Without touching the electronic check other than to open the attachment to look at it, I called the ScamPulse.com and they advised me to call the bank and check to see of the account number and account name checked out. It didn’t. I then called Sletten directly and as soon as I started mentioning the situation they said that kind of scam was something they’ve been getting a lot of reports on and apologized for it. That took me here to the scam tracker and I will also be filing a report with the CFPB. The only information they got from me was my name, address, phone number, and professional resume.