Shivani Mody/TNN
 
Bangalore, Jul 2: Watch out. Fraudulent recruitment mailers are trying to take advantage of people’s desperation for jobs. 

Many IT job aspirants recently received mails claiming to be from Wipro, through the job portal Naukri.com. The letter, which even has a Wipro letterhead and its logo, says the company has 45 job vacancies in its facilities in Delhi, Bangalore, Noida and Pune in the IT, production, electronics and administration departments. It tells candidates to make a refundable deposit of Rs 5,850 in a certain bank account.

It’s an obvious fraud, given its several language and spelling errors. The mail asks for resumes to be sent not to an official email id but to one on Gmail. To make it look authentic, it asks for the requisite documents and also mentions a contact person and a number. When TOI called the number, the person who answered just demanded the money be deposited in the account before 2 pm that day, and kept repeating the interview schedule.

“Such fraud recruitment letters are an industrywide issue and many other IT companies have also noticed it. But, this is the first time we have seen it on an official letterhead with the logo,” says Pradeep Bahirwani, VP (talent acquisition), Wipro Technologies. The company has filed a police complaint and informed the cyber crime cell about it.

B S Murthy, CEO of recruitment firm Leadership Capital Consulting, says the fraudsters could make between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh easily with just one round of recruitment letters. He says fraudsters mostly target people in Grade B and C cities who don’t have access to sufficient information.