Recruiters have been warned to take extra care in taking on international assignments by The Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo). The warning follows an incident in which an APSCo member was contacted by fraudsters with suspect contact details.

The fraudsters in this case supplied a name for a legitimate multinational mining company with offices in London, but the email address was subtly different and the phone numbers went through to a different location, where they responded as if it was the real company office.

APSCo member the Larson Group brought the case to the trade body’s attention. Larson were asked to supply contractor on £1,650 per day. The recruiter then checked with the client company and discovered that they had no-one working for them by the contact name given and their phone numbers and email addresses were also different.

The client company and recruiter affected are taking relevant legal action.

APSCo director Marilyn Davidson says: “It is frighteningly simple to set up domain names and email addresses that are just slightly different from legitimate ones. This is a very old scam that has simply been updated to exploit the technology we have available now. We have included affiliate members in this warning as it is possible that umbrella companies could also get caught.”

To avoid being caught, Davidson advises recruiters;

• check the contact details given against the information available at Company House
• verify the job titles of the contacts with those numbers – not the direct line numbers given by the fraudsters. These checks will show up any fraud quickly as the company will have no record of the names used.
• meet with the client company and candidate

Davidson concludes: “The simple reality is, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”