Dow Chemicals hit by fake job ads

In these times of job cuts, advertisements for job vacancies should be good news for anxious job seekers. Especially, if they are for jobs with well-known companies like Dow Chemicals.

Except, that the ads are for vacancies that don't exist and have not been advertised by the company under whose name they appeared. This is a commonly known hoax and may be referred to as an "advance fee fraud" or the "419 fraud".

A series of classified advertisements appeared in newspapers and job websites between 19 April 19 and -1 May 2009, advertising job openings with the US chemicals giant, The Dow Chemical Company.

The postings have appeared in The Saint Petersburg Times, The Herald, The Hubbard Press, The Allied News, The Dallas Morning News and various job-posting websites. The ads were picked up from the job websites and distributed to other sites via job search engines such as Indeed.com.

The fraudulent job postings claimed to be for accounts receivable positions. Dow Workforce Planning has confirmed that these job postings were not authorised by Dow.

Applicants, and job seekers using Monster.com, approached Dow with complaints of suspicious e-mails stating they had received a job offer and they needed to provide banking information or an address where counterfeit payment could be sent.

"To the best of our knowledge, none of the job seekers or applicants provided personal information to the parties responsible for the hoax," said Kim Wood, manager of investigations, Dow Fraud Investigative Services.

"Fortunately, people contacted Dow's Workforce Planning department to inquire about the validity of the job offers and were able to avoid a bad situation," Wood added.

Dow's Fraud Investigative Services department has alerted US governmental authorities about the attempted job scam.