Would-be workers need to be more cautious with resume services and
posting their personal information online. Online fraudsters and
scammers are waiting.
By Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus Apr 21 2005 10:28AM
Online fraudsters are increasingly taking advantage of vulnerable job
seekers by using online résumés to steal their identity, a privacy
expert warned this week.
The threats range from job fraud, where a criminal group poses as a
legitimate employer to launder money, to the sale of résumé details
to database companies for use in background checks. The seemingly
small act of posting a résumé publicly can have significant impact:
over the past year, more than a dozen Americans have been accused of
a felony because their identity has been used for online crime, said
Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.
"If you post your résumé publicly you are asking for identity fraud,"
she said during an interview with SecurityFocus. "If you have a
fantastic résumé, that puts you at a high risk, because your identity
will get nabbed, and they will use your information to set up a new
account in your name and do criminal acts and it will look like you
participated in this scheme."
Ironically, the major résumé services offer tools to help job seekers
keep their identity private from the public, but workers fail to take
advantage of the features because they do not understand the dangers,
Dixon said. However, a majority of résumé services still don't take
the issues seriously, she added.
Dixon presented the findings of several studies authored by the World
Privacy Forum at the Computer, Freedom and Privacy Forum last week in
Seattle. In addition to identity-theft dangers, other privacy
problems exist as well. She warned that inaccuracies in employment
databases have hurt people's chances of getting the job.
'I think we have about a year and a half. Then people will start
looking at this whole online job search as a really risky affair.'
-- Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum
The campaign to raise awareness of job fraud and inaccuracies in
employment databases comes as major data leaks by companies such as
ChoicePoint and Bank of America have raised public awareness of
identity theft. In the latest incident, online trading firm
Ameritrade reportedly acknowledged this week that as many as 200,000
customers could be at risk because the firm's backup tape service had
lost a key tape. As the number of publicly outed data leaks
increases, scrutiny has turned to the openness of sensitive
employment information as an increasingly threatening vector of
identity theft.
In a typical case of job fraud, for example, a criminal group will
contact a job seeker offering employment handling money transfers.
For each transfer -- usually of a sum just below the federally
mandated $10,000 reporting requirement -- the "employee" gets to keep
5 percent. The scheme, which is aimed at laundering criminal funds,
typically transfers the money to the "employee's" bank account with
instructions to wire the money via Western Union to other accounts.
Other criminal groups pose as employers and attempt to convince job
seekers to give up sensitive information, such as social-security
numbers and bank account information.
"From a job-seeker perspective, use common sense and proceed with
caution," said Michele Pearl, vice president of compliance and anti-
fraud for Monster.com. "People are so excited that there is interest
in them from an employer that they are not always as careful as they
should be."
Pearl confirmed that the company has caught a number of fraudulent
companies trying to convince people to be "hired" unknowingly as part
of a money laundering scheme. Monster.com gives job seekers a variety
of privacy options for resumes, including hiding the details from all
searches. The company does not sell or rent its resume database and
screens every potential employer, Pearl said.
"It is something we take very seriously," she said.
Monster.com outlines many of the dangers of which job seekers should
be aware in its Be Safe page.
While sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder may have increased
their scrutiny of postings, the majority of sites still do not
adequately vet prospective employers, the World Privacy Forum's Dixon
said.
Other sites harvest résumés that people have posted to their Web
sites, with online service TalentBlast bragging that it has access to
over 250,000 résumés posted to personal home pages.
Some of the scrutiny focused on consumer information services, such
as ChoicePoint, should also be reserved for the employee services,
Dixon said.
"I think we have about a year and a half," she said. "Then people
will start looking at this whole online job search as a really risky
affair."
---
* Origin: [adminz] tech, security, support (192:168/0.2)
generated by msg2page 0.06 on Jul 21, 2006 at 19:03:52
search: