Friends of the conservatory “scam or deceptive marketing?!”
As software development is a highly competitive market, you always have to be gaining more skills and betting yourself just to survive. It is also imperative that you stay safe and watch out what kind of content you are putting out there to the world as companies are now using social media to investigate your fitness to a given job.
All this is fine and well even though it is tough and time-consuming but the most annoying issue of all is to watch out for time-wasting technical recruiters and even worst “scammers”.
There is an ongoing scam -or let’s get gracious and call it “deceptive marketing scheme”- until I get a clarification from https://volunteerparktrust.org/friends-of-the-conservatory/ or as they call themselves “Friends of the Conservatory”.
Q: So what is the scam you might ask?
A: Ok, here it is in simple steps and screenshots as well:
1- a recruiter contact you on Linked In here is his profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-haapier-4b7b30203/ which is now surprisingly deleted after I threatened to expose him.
2- He passes you to the alleged company Slack community to talk to the CEO. His name is “Cletus S. Law” -sounds like Part Simpson pranking me, right !- but unlike Part Simpson, he provided me with an official contract and NDA.
3- After “ Mr. Cletus” is finished with interviewing you for the developer role he passes you to Mr. CTO “another prank person” who asks you to create a paid account on Microsoft Azure. When you ask why they say because you will be using it for company projects.
4- after creating the account and sending them a screenshot as proof they simply delete you from Slack workspace.
So as a conclusion, please be careful of this scam and don’t sign in any documents you send you. This is both a waste of time and maybe a marketing scam to get developers to sign up for Azure.
Disclaimer: I am contacting “Friends of the conservatory” at the moment and will update this article with the reply I get from their Team. I want to repeat again that those scammers might or might not work for the company they alleged to be working for. That is why I am getting more clearance on the matter.
Resources:
https://thefriendsoft-cii5893.slack.com/ (slack community for the scammers)
