Fraudulent job posting targets students

By Brandon Rowe & CiCi Fan

Many students are on a break right now and looking for summer work.

But one student has a warning after she nearly fell victim to a fraudulent posting on the University of Toronto’s official job board.

“I was on the University of Toronto website, the official website, so it should be safe. I went on it and saw an amazing opportunity for a nine-month internship in Barcelona, Spain,” Sophia Martin Schmitz said. “And I thought, ‘what an amazing opportunity.'”

Programa AC advertises itself as an overseas internship program to teach English — a dream job for Sophia — until red flags started popping up.

“So at first we started corresponding back and forth a few times, and we sent a few emails and it was fine. They were asking for my resume this and that… and then they asked in the next email if I could kindly send a picture of my face and body, and that’s when I thought that’s a little weird,” she said.

Sophia notified the U of T and school officials then confirmed that the ad is in fact fraudulent. The ad was pulled from the website and an email was sent to students, notifying them about the issue.

In an email, officials told her: “The University of Toronto reviews new employers and job postings by checking for the legitimacy of email addresses, office locations, websites and certificates of incorporation provided by employers. However, we do not always catch clever scammers. Therefore, students need to exercise caution and common sense when responding to any job posting.”

CityNews tried to reach out to Programa AC via phone and email and did not receive a response.

We also noticed that there are a number of universities that still have job ads from this company on their job boards.

Sophia says she doesn’t feel like she can trust university job boards anymore.

“It makes me worried because what else is on there that is not right, that is fraudulent, that they haven’t caught,” she said.

 

The University of Toronto has provided the following advice on how to avoid being scammed by a fraudulent job posting

Fraud Advisory by CityNewsToronto on Scribd

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