TULSA, Okla. — One mistake may have cost a Tulsan his identity. A fake online job opening lured Hunter Griffin in. The people who conducted his interview posed as staff from a local medical clinic.
Griffin is a 20-year-old currently working part-time as caregiver. He hopes to land a solid job through a job search made difficult by the pandemic.
“That’s all I'm trying to do, is find a job that I can survive on,” Griffin said. “That's what I need. That was the goal.”
A goal which Griffin thought he achieved when someone who posed as a recruiter for a Tulsa medical clinic texted him after he applied to an Indeed.com job posting.
“It was a little bit of ignorance for me, obviously, not knowing that a text-to-text interview isn’t that legit,” said Griffin.
The person on the other end of the text messages got Griffin’s email address and asked him to download an instant messaging software called Telegram.
Griffin said, “A family member of mine did get hired on through the internet, so it wasn’t really a strange, weird request.”
Then Griffin was asked multiple questions. He said, “They did ask me about my work history. They asked me general interview questions. ‘Tell me about yourself.’”
Someone who went by the name of Mrs. Laura Keep asked Griffin for his address, for him to fill out a W-4 form and to send copies of his ID.
Monday morning, Griffin called the medical clinic directly to be sure of the process. That is when he found out he was being scammed.
“I was very surprised. I really needed that job,” Griffin said.
The incident doesn’t surprise Jeff Woods.
“There are lots and lots of security breaches happening every day,” Woods said.
Woods and his team at Realize Information Technology make a living by keeping up with every new angle hackers use to draw money.
“A lot of people believe this can’t happen to me,” Woods said. “It can. It can happen to anybody.”
Griffin plans to reapply to the Tulsa medical clinic’s job opening, this time the right way. Also, on his to-do list: filing a police report.
2 Works for You tried contacting the number and Telegram account that Griffin was talking to. The phone number kept showing up as busy and the person posing as Mrs. Keep on Telegram did not respond.
A representative of the medical clinic whose name was used in the fake job posting did respond, saying they found out about the scam after receiving calls from multiple applicants.
An Indeed.com rep referred 2 Works for You to their online guidelines for safe job searching. One of them includes insisting on an in-person or video interview.
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