As we prepare ourselves for the placement season, the social engineers behind the unknown numbers are preparing themselves too. Nowadays, there is an increase in online application job board, which gives hackers or social engineers to get your information.
We can’t just blur out the phone number; how will the actual HR connect then? But, what we can do is, we can collect red flags and save ourselves from this social engineering. All you need is a bit of common sense and awareness. Really, trust me. (Also, on a side note, during my internship in the cyber department of police, most of the scams are social engineering, which can be stopped with the help of awareness).
I will give you three simple steps to spot the scam, using examples. You can find the flowchart at the end of the article.
The Call
The first step is to see if the caller is registered as a scammer or not by others.
To see if its registered as a scammer or not:
- Open Truecaller or any other contact verification application.
- Block the number. (Sometimes, if the block rate is low, the comments won’t show up, but after blocking it will) 🚩🚩🚩🚩
Block and leave if this tests passes as true, if not, lets go to step 2
The name
Search for the person on LinkedIn, then Facebook, then Instagram and then google. If you don’t find them, that’s a red flag, or maybeeee they don’t like social media at all. 🚩🚩🚩
This step is really blurred line, but it does give us some solid red flags.
Lets go to the techy step 3
The mail
Now, this is the most crucial part; you need to see the email header of the mail received.
The first step is the see the original email address of the company, the easiest way to do this is look at the customer service email of the company via Google.
If the domains don’t then its fake, if they match do the following to be doubly sure:
- Open the mail and click on the 3 dots on the side
- Click on show original
- Copy the From address
- Paste it into some case converter like Convert Case!
Can you see, instead of IDBI its LDBI.
- If you are feeling little more techy, see the IP address and look for ringing bells.
Summary
Other red flags
- Extremely quick process (like, in 1 day you are done) 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
- Super big company but no career portal and asking for direct apply via job sites 🚩🚩🚩🚩
- Asking for non educational or personal email 🚩🚩🚩
- Asking for bank information to give salary 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
- Rattling out scripted paragraphs 🚩🚩🚩
