How to avoid scams

How to avoid scams


Dishonesty and fraud affects translations just like any other industry. As in the recent years globalization gave us an opportunity to work and develop, the same portals, which offered jobs, become often misused by fraudsters preying for their victims.

In the whole variety of scams in translation we can distinguish two types:
- those which aim to poses victims money,
- those which aim to make a translator work without pay.

How can we indentify a possible scam?

The things which I will point out here are to be used as guidelines only because we can never be 100% sure who is lying. We can only suspect. However, if our suspicions were to become void, then whatever is left could be only a badly managed and poorly presented company which is not worth attention of a self respected translator.

We should be cautious if a company which advertises a job:
- doesn’t have a website,
- doesn’t provide full contact details,
- uses gmail email,
- reveals bad grammar and spelling errors while contacting you,
- is not keen to check your qualifications and experience,
- wants to pay you upfront,

If any of the above will happen then we should start cross-referencing the company. If the company is an agency, you can consider calling your fellow translator to check if they are genuine. Except this use internet browsers to check their ‘publicity’. When I do this, I type ‘company name’ + scam or ‘company name’ + blacklisted e.g., TranslationCloud + scam. Usually when someone had a bad experience and indentified a scammer, they will try to warn others.

The aim of cross-referencing is not only to check legitimacy of the company but to make sure they’re not trying to fool you by pretending to be someone else who has good reputation. The best scammers know how human perception works. Just like Frank Abagnale ‘Catch me if you can’ who knew how to use uniforms and titles to make an impression of a genuine and trustworthy person.

If you happened to have a telephone number for the company then use this website http://whocallsme.com/

If you have a website’s URL but the website seems to be badly made or without contact details, you can use this website http://www.godaddy.com/ to check who actually registered the domain.

If you know the IP address of person who sent you an email (in the header) go to http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup or download this software http://www.gotranslators.com/Upload/TraceRoute218.zip to checks this person’s real location.

This is a list of emails used by scammers http://www.419scam.org/419-bl-a.htm

You should never make any decisions without sufficient knowledge on the subject. If you don’t know, ask for advice people who you know. For instance, a company could ask you to purchase their expensive software as a condition of the assignment. If you never heard about this software ask for a second independent opinion on the product and cross-reference the company.

Never reveal your sensitive data such as bank details to unknown parties. The most common payment scam looks like that. “I’m sorry translator, we’ve made a payment to your account but we accidently paid you too much. Could you please wire us the difference?” After wiring the difference the translator found out that the payment for him was phony and he was scammed.