EN
Work from Home Job Scams have been around for decades but with remote work becoming increasingly common, fake remote job offers have become more believable and attract many more victims.
A ScamAdviser follower from the UK - let’s call him Harry - shared their recent experience with us regarding a work from home job offer appearing to be from the Chinese ecommerce giant AliExpress. Read on to know how scammers are stealing money from job-seekers under the guise of hiring them for a job with AliExpress.
The scam began with an unsolicited SMS message stating that AliExpress is “looking for 200 part-time jobs” to help the company ‘expand their business’. Though no additional details have been provided, an attractive pay of £50 to £200 per day is being offered for the job. Interested candidates are asked to get in touch via WhatsApp.
The poor use of English and asking candidates to communicate via WhatsApp are the first red flags as legitimate organizations do not hire in this manner.
Even though Harry suspected that this was a scam, he contacted the recruiter via WhatsApp for more information. The person at the other end introduced themself as Zora from AliExpress.
Zora continued on by giving a vague and confusing explanation of what the job entails. The scammer then asked Harry to register on the website aliexonpre.com which does not seem to have any real association with AliExpress.
The domain registration information of AlieXonpre reveals that it is a new website created anonymously in June 2022.
After registering on the platform and performing some menial tasks, Harry requested to be paid for the day. This is when the story took a different turn. First, Zora asked Harry to move the conversation to Telegram. The likely reason for this is that scammers operate in teams and Zora on WhatsApp is likely a low-level scammer passing on the victim to the high-level scammer who operates via Telegram.
Zora’s display picture on Telegram confusingly showed a white woman even though Zora’s poor English peppered with Chinese expressions gave the impression that she must be Chinese. A quick image search revealed that the image of Zora has been stolen from a Twitter profile.
After contacting Zora on Telegram, Harry was told that in order to ‘become an official employee of the mall’, he must first pay $59 to upgrade to the level of VIP1.
The above screenshot provides some clues that AlieXonpre is likely to be operating a pyramid scheme. The VIP1 package is referred to as an ‘investment’ and a ‘commission’ of 5.8% is also mentioned. Therefore, AlieXonpre does not seem to be an online job platform and rather is likely to be a fraudulent and illegal investment platform.
When Harry became even more suspicious and called the scammer out for lying, Zora deleted all the messages and threatened to call the police.
Harry was fortunate that he follows ScamAdviser and was aware of such scams being carried out online. Sadly, many others aren’t aware and end up investing a lot of time into fake platforms like AlieXonpre. Once a person has invested time, they also feel obligated to invest money at the demand of the scammer due to the false hope that they will be compensated for their effort.
If you receive an unsolicited job offer such as the one Harry got, it would be wise to remember the adage, “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.”
