Fake job postings and e-mails continue from Monster.com

Every few days, I get an e-mail with “Great News!”

It’s from the ultimate fake job site – no, not Craigslist – but Monster.com.

The e-mail is the same every time, and it informs me that is has found a “Journalism, Design and Photography Opportunity” in Sarasota. The employer? The U.S. Navy.

Bullshit.

This is an example of the spamming Monster.com does because some companies (including the Navy) pay Monster to post fake job postings. There are no jobs with the Navy in Sarasota in journalism. It’s just to lure you in to get called by a recruiter for an exciting career, probably as a nondesignated striker, on some destroyer in the winter in the North Atlantic.

Sorry, but at 48 and as a Marine Corps veteran, I’d eat the eagle, globe and anchor before I’d ever put on that silly squid outfit.

The sad reality is that this is the golden age of the job scam. Scumbag scam artists have a mass of choices for their entertainment, including the aforementioned Craigslist, Monster.com, Careerbuilder, and the bogus and nonsensical job advice in what’s left of our local newspapers.

There’s an outfit in Tampa called Pro Source Services, and they purport to be some kind of marketing company, but they’re also bogus, according to some who’ve fallen for their game. They post under a couple of names on Monster.com looking for “entry-level” people and pretending to offer real jobs.

I’m pretty savvy, and I have to confess that I even sent a resume to Pro Source thinking it was a real company. Fortunately, they never called back.

The other big scam out there is the “laptop presentation” scheme. This is really nasty, because it’s trying to sell annuities to senior citizens. Any company with “Ameri-,” “Income,” “Life,” “National,” “Liberty” or any combination thereof is probably an annuity company looking for economically desperate people to pitch their trash to seniors. So many retired folks have been scammed in Florida, even the state’s CFO has complained about the companies, but they appear to own a few key state legislators, and that keeps them in business. Once in a while one gets busted, but the rest keep on keepin’ on.

Some people wonder why you never read exposes about Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com and the junk jobs they allow on their site. Simple. Newspapers have deals with those two and would rather write about job scams on Craigslist, though it is true that virtually all the job ads on Craigslist are bullshit.

But there are exceptions. The place I work at recently got good results from its Craigslist job ad. Why? Well, my boss was honest about the qualifications for the job and, most important, he put up his real business e-mail address and the business’s real phone number (I should know, I took many of the calls.)

We had a good number of fabulous and well-qualified people who inquired, and picked someone who is eager to become a member of the team. I did my best in replying to all of those who called and wrote (mostly by e-mail but a couple of people got a phone call) to thank them for applying and to tell them the job was filled. It hurts, I know, to get that call or e-mail, but I felt that replying to them and acknowledging them was the right thing to do.

See, that’s the way to do things honestly and upfront, even on a site like Craigslist. No hiding behind “craigslist.org” e-mail addresses, no lies, no deliberate vagueness.

Times are hard enough for everyone as it is, and to read about all the fake job posters out there and the pain they’re causing is infuriating. Knowing that job ad companies are complicit in a lot of the fakes and frauds just shows their managers’ moral bankruptcy.

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