Identify Fake Online Companies

These days unemployment has increased on an alarming rate. Many educated people are jobless due to the financial instability through out the world. In search of jobs these jobless people come to know about easy, home based online earning jobs like data entry, web surfing, article writing, ad posting etc. At first these jobs seems very attractive and people start dreaming of earning 200$–300$ a month by just doing part time home based assignments.

Online Jobs are increasing day by day and it seems like everyone is creating his own company and has started making people fool. You might also have purchased package from any of those companies, worked day and night, submitted your first assignment and then you got balance shown in your online account. You became very happy and started working continuously.

But your later submitted assignments were either rejected or were very heavily underpaid. REASON !!! the company is SCAM and FRAUD, but you may never be able to know this or you don’t want to know that the company is fraud because you have invested money in the company and you can’t see loosing it. But the truth remains truth… and should be shown to others so that this flood of fake online jobs should be stopped and poor people should be saved from these companies. We will tell you some simple and some advance steps to verify the company’s authenticity and to identify fake online job companies.

Step 1: Read Terms & Conditions

Always read the terms and conditions of the company, usually these companies have very strict policy of not entertaining any request. They can block/terminate your account without prior notice. Also if you try to compare the terms and conditions with any famous online jobs company you will come to know that the terms and conditions have been copy pasted from another website.

Step 2: Verify Franchises

Beware of Fraud!

This is very simple and important step, this will tell you if the company has some real business partners or not. Just go to the franchises page. Now the trick is not to count the Pakistani franchises, instead check the franchises of all other countries other than Pakistan. There will be few listed from India, Bangladesh, Philippines etc. Most of these franchises will be fake and were shown on website just to give the impression that the company is international, valid and has been into business in for quite a long time. These franchises will have either no contact information or will have fake contact information.

Step 3: Verify Phone

Check the contact us page of the company and try to find if any phone number is given, also check under franchises. If any phone number is given then check the country code of that phone number and go to the international country codes and verify if the country code matches with the country of franchise or company. Also try to call that number to check if the number is operational or not. We recommend that if the number is operational then you do talk to them and share your concerns regarding the authenticity of the company. You will loose not more than 100/- Rs, but you will save your 10,000/- Rs and will have high chances of earning.

But remember!! even if you talk to someone fluent in English, it doesn’t mean that he is the American/British or Australian guy and the company is valid, because there are many people in Pakistan as well which can speak in the American or other accents. But at least you will be sure that the number works and country code also matches.

Step 4: Verify Email and Reply time

The possibility of getting a phone number is very low. Mostly you will find email ids on contact information. So to verify the emails just write a general email asking information about the company, also ask the payment proof and authenticity of the company, ask if the company is legally registered or not. Send this email to the company’s official email id and also send it to all of the franchisers other than Pakistan.

If any of those email ids were fake then you will immediately receive a bounce back email indicating that the email id is incorrect or does not exist. In this way you will immediately know that the franchise is not original. Now wait and see if you get any reply from company or franchisers. If you don’t get any reply within 3 working days, send another email on the previous email asking them to please reply your original email. Do this for maximum 2 weeks, and you will be able to know that how much responsive the company is and how much time they will take to entertain your query.

Step 5: Verify Address

Now another thing to verify is the physical location of company’s office or franchise. Check if the company has given its location or not. If the company is legal and has proper office then it will always disclose its location. Check the franchise locations as well. One thing you should take care is that the address should be absolute and not general. e.g SMCyber’s office location is “40-M, Zainab Towers, Link Road, Model Town, Lahore, Pakistan”; this is absolute address and anyone can reach our office with this address, however if we have written only “Model Town, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan” then this would be a general address and no one can reach the office because how will you find our office in the whole Model town even if it exists.

The companies/franchises that give general address have no office in real. They only operate through website. Now suppose the company has absolute address, then you should go to Google Earth or Google Maps and try to find out that location on maps. If you find that exact location/area or are too close to it somewhat then might be they have a valid office. But remember!! locations and addresses can be copied from other websites or maps as well, so you cannot completely rely on the addresses.

Step 6: Check Google Page rank and Alexa rank

Google page rank is the measure of popularity of a particular page of website on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is the lowest rank and 10 is the highest rank. Alexa rank is the popularity of the complete website on a scale of 1 to onwards, where Alexa rank of 1 is most popular website in the whole world. e.g Google.com has page rank of 1 and also Alexa rank of 1. Facebook’s main page Facebook.com has page rank of 1 and Alexa rank of 2.

You check the page/Alexa rank in different ways, we have downloaded an add-on ‘Search Status‘  for Firefox. You can see the page rank and Alexa rank of COJ and 247 below:

COJ Page & Alexa rank

247 Page & Alexa rank

As you can see above that the COJ is very much popular among the public. If a company is new then its page rank will be low or zero and its Alexa rank will be greater. These ranks can help you determine whether the company is new into the business or has quite a market.

Step 7: Check website/domain registration

This is a technical and very useful step. You can check when the website/domain was registered, who registered it, from which hosting company it was registered and where are the servers located. Some websites may have hidden their who.is registry information or provided fake information. e.g lets check who.is registry of COJ through ‘http://www.who.is‘ :

You will see the registry information as below:

COJ registry information

As you can see in the above image that the website was registered (created) on 08-Dec-2009, which shows the company is into business since last 1.5 years. DNS Name servers are from ‘ixwebhosting.com’. You can go to the ‘www.ixwebhosting.com’ and check whether the hosting company provides hosting in Pakistan or not. If the company has its office in Pakistan as well then there is a fair possibility that the website was registered from Pakistan.You might see the Alexa rank and Page views as well, which have already been discussed above. Some sites may reveal the web servers location as well e.g Virtual Online Jobs.

VOJ Server Location

You now lets check the COJ registrant contact information. The domain is registered by N, Jonathan through email ‘admin@cyberonlinejobs.com‘ and the address seems to be absolute. You can further verify the address through the Google maps and Google earth. Also the email on new domain ‘@cyberonlinejobs.com‘ is Only available after the domain is registered and mail is configured, which means that the who.is information has been altered by the registrant itself to protect its original identity and show fake identity after registration is complete.  You can also call on the given number and verify whether the number belongs to COJ company or someone else.

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SMCyber may add new tips and tricks to identify fake online jobs. So stay tuned and come back for new posts and updates.

Regards,
SMCyber

Policy of fake online jobs

Now a days we find dozens of Online Jobs available on the internet which are increasing day by day. You might also have purchased package from those companies and then came to know that they have very deceiving policy. We will tell you what these companies do by an example:

You purchased a package from any new online company and started working. You completed one assignment in around 15 days and then submitted it. Now you will have to wait usually 10 days to check if your assignment was correct. There are 95% chances that your first assignment will be accepted, even if it has a lot of errors (because they don’t want you to run-away and start yelling “This company is fraud”). You will see some balance in your online account provided by that company. Although you won;t receive the complete payment of that assignment. You will send an email to company’s admin and also ask the company’s franchise about this. The admin will not reply to your email and franchiser won’t give you any reasonable answer.

Nevertheless you will be very happy and excited that you “Earned“ something. Then you submit few more assignments, but this time you get less income, also some of your assignments might be rejected due to your excessive working or any other reason which you will never know. You might become dis-hearted and lose interest and trust in the company.

At this stage you will give less time to completing assignments. You will ask your friends and family member to work on your account. Due to them you will successfully submit few more assignments and earn few more dollars and finally you cross the threshold limit of check withdrawl. Check processing and receiving will take 10-15 days.

This whole process from purchasing package to the first check would be completed in average 2 months. During this time period you have also paid the Electricity Charges, Internet Charges and some other charges as well.

Once you get the check you will be very happy that at least you EARNED something….But….!
“The first check don;t even covers the amount you have invested in the company.”

But here you have paid other charges as well, so you really haven’t earned anything, infact you have wasted your time and money. We will say that  “You invested money in company and then you spent more money to get your investment back.“

Once you have withdrawed one check, the chances to withdraw subsequent (more) checks are highly reduced. The company will try its best to stop you from working by increasing your assignment size, frequently changing their policy, rejecting your assignments, reluctantly taking their links offline and spending too much time on their maintenance…etc

If you are lucky enough you might be able to withdraw 3-4 checks. You might think you have done a good job, but you have forgot that during this complete process you told many of your friends, and showed them your online account balance, then from the word of mouth the advertisement of the company starts. Your friends purchase the account and start working. Once you get the first check, you show it to your friends and they also become excited and start working more and also refer others.  You have brought a lot of revenue to the company by referring your friends, but the company only paid you a tiny fraction of that revenue.

These companies deceive you by taking money from you and then out of your invested money they start giving you a very small fraction from time to time, and you start believing that this company do pays, but infact you have fell victim to the company and Wasted your Time and Money.

If you try to tell others that the company is fraud then they won’t trust you and someone might say “Hey you are lier, i myself have got one check from the company“. So the company will never be tagged “FRAUD“, because the company is very intelligent and pays few people and keeps other people struggling to get paid. Those who get the check will always defend the company.

So you can’t do anything about the company. But you can share your experience with SMCyber, and we will share your experience with others who are willing to purchase the account but consults SMCyber before doing so.

SMCyber will soon post useful tips to identify fake online jobs. So stay tuned and come back for new posts.

Regards,
SMCyber