UX/UI designer Viktoriia Dzhus stumbled upon a new fraud scheme — an impostor introduced himself as an HR of ZIO-soft and demanded to sign an offer and a non-disclosure agreement.
But, as it turned out, the company itself knew nothing about him. His name on Telegram is Anton Korol, and his profile says Anton Korolev.
The details of his story are as follows shared in a post on LinkedIn.
Vacancy from a Telegram bot
She found the vacancy in a Telegram bot that collects posts from various channels. The contact was redirected to «HR by Anton Korol». And during the conversation, the girl began to get suspicious:
- Telegram had auto-delete messages;
- was not very happy to provide a link to the company’s website;
- communicated without video and in Russian.
At the interview, Anton said almost immediately that she was a good fit for them.
«I am happy! Do you know why? Because I’ve been looking for my first job for a long time! I don’t understand how hiring in IT works! And Anton the asshole said that the company even has designers from GoIT (Victoria — graduate of GoIT courses). I’m already thinking about spending money on a Mac in 3 months,” she wrote.
Offer, NDA
This was followed by a proposal to sign an offer and a non-disclosure agreement. But even here, doubts grew:
- No information about the company could be found;
- The non-disclosure agreement seemed strange;
- found The emailer’s profile on LinkedIn, but his last name was different and he had only 20 contacts.
In particular, the profile states that the man is a graduate of Alfred Nobel University.
After that, she asked her friends for advice and was advised to request an interview with the leader and the team. And that was basically the end of the story.
She was told that the «lead is very busy, so they are looking for help to spread the tasks to». After one more request, the impostor stopped answering.
Community members suggested that this is probably how fraudsters try to obtain confidential information (card details, accounts) through a contract.
Or, perhaps, they will offer to do a paid internship.
Similar experiences shared other job seekers in the comments.
«Hello, almost identical experience with this “hr”, after viewing the portfolio, an instant assessment that I was a good fit for them, he said that their designer came to look at the figma with the name Sergei Frolov, but I doubt that I dropped my files and the designer was free at the same time and came in. Only we didn’t get to the point of the interview, it was scheduled, but he read my messages both times and ignored me, it didn’t happen. The first time he deleted the chat and forgot about the interview. He scheduled it for another day, the same thing», — wrote designer Yana Khodzhynska.