Victim Location 10941
Total money lost $599
Type of a scam Employment
I was contacted by a fake recruiter offering a work from home Senior QA role with Amazon. They said I needed an Agile Scrum Certification that was in progress to be considered.
I also received a fake phone call from someone who said they were Amazon HR and I was submitted by Spectrum Staffing.
They got me to purchase an "amazon approved" agile scrum master certification course to get an interview, because the class I chose was not recognized by Amazon. The online class I purchased was way cheaper than the others that I looked at.
When the interview was scheduled they used a name of an Amazon recruiter from LinkedIn. I was told he was the "Head of HR".
During the interview I asked "Why is the head of HR doing a simple phone screen on Christmas eve? Couldn’t you have someone else do this?" He dodged the question.
From the phone interview, it was obvious the person who was interviewing me was not from Amazon.
Victim Location 20155
Total money lost $599
Type of a scam Employment
I received a phone call from an individual named Kris Gome stating he was a recruiter for Amazon. Amazon picked my resume from 100 people to move forward with a phone screening. He asked me a series of qualifying questions about a position and sent me the job description to review. The person then told me that I would be required to have Agile certification for him to move forward with my application with Amazon. I told him I would need time to review what my options were. He sent me a list of classes that Amazon uses for training and told me to pick from them. Of course, the first one the list was from Learning-era which was three times cheaper than the other training classes that were legit. Kris kept calling to make sure I signed up so that he could schedule the next phase of the interview with Amazon. Come to find out this a scam that is being run under several corporate names. I called the staffing company and once I found another office online and they told me that no one my Kris Gomes works for them and that they have had several people call asking for him. The training companies they are selling are as follows: Learning- Era, Course Info-TechNiwtontech E-learning LLC, and Course Alliance.
Victim Location 08854
Type of a scam Employment
Similar to complaint against Direct Staffing Services, I received a job posting for Sr. QA for T-Mobile. I was advised to submit my resume to Kris Gomes and then asked to sign up for a scrum master course to show that certification was in process. I was directed to https://learning-era.com/product/scrum-master-certification-basic-package/ where I was asked to pay $450.00.
Fortunately my credit card company flagged this activity as suspicious and the charge was declined. I cancelled my credit card and advised Mr. Gomes that I would be filing this complaint.
Victim Location 28677
Total money lost $599
Type of a scam Employment
On July 12 I received a call from a person claiming to be a recruiter and he said they had a job opportunity. I asked them to email the job description and I received an email from [email protected] The job looked perfect except it required Scrum Master certification, which I did not have. I sent my resume and spoke with Kris and he said the company (T-Mobile) was interested in my resume but I needed to enroll in Scrum Master training to demonstrate I was getting the certification before they could submit my resume. He sent me contact information for 3 companies that provided Scrum Master training saying they were recognized by T-Mobile. One was significantly lower cost than the others and was also online so there wasn’t any need to attend an in-person class, so that was the obvious choice. I signed up for the class and sent Kris confirmation of my enrollment and he said he would call me the following Tuesday to schedule an interview.
After getting enrolled and included in what I thought was in the pipeline of candidates for interviews with T-Mobile, I did some additional research as I normally do on Spectrum Staffing Co. I did not find the company or Kris Gomes on LinkedIn, which is highly irregular in this industry. I explored the Spectrum Staffing Co website and found that beyond the surface level of the website, the site doesn’t have any functionality. The site is full if incorrect English language usage. The links are dead and several of the job descriptions listed are copied from Robert Half. I discovered that the description for the job listing that I applied for was actually copied from an article on how to write a resume. I called the property management company for the building Spectrum Staffing Co lists as their address but the building management company responded saying they have no record of this company in that building. I checked the registration for the website on WHOIS and found the site is from Punjab and registered with GoDaddy.
My next step was to research the training company and I found they are a legitimate training company based in India and operating in the United States. I contacted the CEO through LinkedIn and they graciously offered to look into it and refund my money. I sent them the details of how the scam operates and, to date, I haven’t heard back on the results of their investigation and they did refund my money.
This is a pretty elaborate scam and I can only assume that the scammers who set up fake jobs and a fake staffing company website must get some sort of referral from the training company as their incentive to conduct these scams. I get a lot of email from a lot of recruiters and normally I can spot something that seems not quite right pretty quickly but the urgency to get the enrollment completed quickly and get in before a deadline in order to get the perfect job caused me to drop my guard. Lesson learned!
Victim Location 02169
Type of a scam Employment
As with the scam described for Niwtontech / Learning Era / Course Infotech etc names for the same company, "recruiter" from "spectrum staffing co" offered an interview that requires certification as a Scrum Master / Scrum Product Owner, then also offers certification through Learning Era costing $599. Of course I have to provide documentation proving I’ve purchased this training to have my application for the job submitted, with lots of pressure to purchase immediately.
‘learning-era.com’ claims to partner with VMEDU.com and Good-E-Learning as well. spectrumstaffingco.com and learning era have few backlinks and the websites seem like dummy sites. The address in Seattle does not correspond, nor does a linkedin search for the recruiter. He appears to be using a stock image as the linkedin profile picture.