Job Scams Make Bloomington Bankruptcy Attorney's Blood Boil

It's no secret - scams make my blood boil. Here I am, working for close to twenty-five years to help people facing severe financial challenges. Along with the Columbus bankruptcy lawyers who work in the Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy law offices there, I work to help stop foreclosures on my Indiana bankruptcy clients' homes. Then we run up against foreclosure consultant scammers preying on vulnerable homeowners - it's enough to make anyone outraged!

Then, as an Indianapolis bankruptcy attorney, I encourage debtors to rebuild their credit step by step after emerging from bankruptcy. Then I learn of identity theft schemes of every kind that can so easily sabotage all the debtors' best efforts. Talk about blood boiling!

The most recent scam warnings issued by the Federal Trade Commission have to do with the cruelest kind of all - online job scams. These just really get to me. Job losses, mind you, have always been one of the three leading causes of bankruptcy, along with divorce and medical bills. But, during the past two years, with the job situation being so very difficult, it's extraordinarily cruel to target the unemployed. The scams typically begin with job placement ads or work-at-home schemes.

The FTC warns the public not to fall for online offers such as:

Job listings in return for a fee
A business "opportunity" in return for an up-front investment
Ads seeking to hire people to use their own PayPal accounts to facilitate transactions with foreigners (It typically turns out there are no real foreign customers, and the US middlemen victims are hit with penalties and fees from PayPal and the credit cards).

As Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum explains, "help wanted" scams work "because unemployed people are vulnerable." I'm hoping that my Indiana bankruptcy clients and bankruptcy blog readers get the message loud and clear. In today's economy, a lot of people need the help of a debt consolidation lawyer and Indianapolis bankruptcy attorney. What they don't need is online job scammers!

Comments for Job Scams Make Bloomington Bankruptcy Attorney's Blood Boil

Thursday, July 21, 2011 by Erinn:: I second you. I'm studying paralegal studies at the moment, and I am also unemployed, so is my husband. We have an infant daughter. I was laid off twice consecutively after only working for each company for a total of 1 month and three days! That's all the employment I've been able to secure. there is nothing wrong with my resume, nothing wrong with me (i'm always neat and well mannered), and they always tell me so, but I just get laid off. When me and my husband are desperate, and have to move out of our apartment to move in with relatives who are retired because all the rest of our family works and they barely make enough to support themselves, we get hit with all these job scams. we need jobs, and all they care about is how to scam us out of the little pennies we have! I wouldn't be looking for a job if I had money, so paying to get a job is ridiculous. My husband has just recently gotten a decent paying job, however, it is only temporary. Apparently, once you can't make a sales quota they set for you at this job and you slip for too long, they fire you. My husband is a natural salesman, but still...the fact that it takes one bad week to get someone fired is worrying. We need decent paying jobs! All we ask for is maybe 12 dollars an hour for both of us to give us a decent living! But we can't even get that. All we can get are scams, bad jobs, and laid off. What are parents to do in this cruel world?