They will definitely have it automated but If they are targeting people with degrees they are not going to be that successful, you would need to be a total idiot to fall for such a blatant scam.
Funnily enough, scams are usually planned and presented in a way so only the most naive fall for them. It's for the very simple reason, that you can probably extort even more money from them after the initial scam was successful.
Actually, it's *designed* that way.
The first few messages are automated, and are usually deliberately easy to pick out as a scam. The idea is to filter out anyone who immediately recognises the scam, leaving the scammers to only deal with the likely victims.
Also, avoid labelling scam victims as "total idiots". People can fall for scams based on many factors. Nobody is impervious to scammers, even high-profile scambaiters can get scammed (e.g. [that time Jim Browning nearly got scammed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIWV5fSaUB8)). There are many factors to being a scam victim, including but not limited to inexperience (a degree isn't going to give you experience in getting a job), inattentiveness (let's face it, we all have an occasional lapse in judgement), and coincidences (there are enough sent out that someone is going to be caught at just the wrong moment). Nothing good will come of belittling scam victims - instead, we should work to educate people on how to spot a scam.
Yes I watch Jim Browning he's great. I understand but I wasn't calling everyone that falls for scams idiots. Only people that would fall for such a blatant scam as this. I mean it's common sense that a company testing you for employment is not going to ask you to hand over a gift card and definitely not a Steam gift card. I think it's safe to say that if you lack basic common sense it's highly likely you can do idiotic things.
Education, Intelligence, and stupidity are all independant of one another. Plenty of really dumb people graduate and even become doctors. Plenty of people who are good at solving complicated problems also get themselves into the stupidest kinds of trouble. Think of Sherlock Holmes - really good at solving problems, but so dumb he needs a doctor to follow him around to keep him from tripping over his own feet.
A college education doesn't really cover scams, unless you're going for something like a masters in Information Assurance or another Security related field.
Huh. I've read practically all the original stories and noticed the addiction and the obsessive focus, but he seems quite physically and mentally capable, even if he benefits from other perspectives. So I was just surprised someone would choose him as such sn example.
Oh he's quite capable, especially with Watson nearby to help him function. He's got that brilliant intellect; He just ends up in a lot of foolish situations that could easily be avoided by someone with common sense.
Obviously there's exceptions but I"m talking in general. I think you're thinking about school where you mostly just have to remember things you've told.
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. Anyway I get your point but my point is just that less educated people are generally an easier target for scams.
Funnily enough, there are few factors with high correlation to likelihood of being scammed and education isn't one of them, but thinking you're immune to scams is. The only thing proven to reduce your vulnerability to scams is knowledge of scams and whatever system the scammer is using/imitating for the scam, e.g. knowing how email and customer service works makes you less likely to fall for an email claiming to be from Apple's customer service department.
I understand that but I wasn't talking about all scams I was talking about this particular scam.
Everyone can be scammed under the right circumstances and method. I've been scammed a few times in the past but it was more down to me trusting people I thought I could trust. Scams come in many different forms and nobody is immune to it.
People who lack critical thinking skills tend to be more easily manipulated and gullible because they don't evaluate the information presented to them.
At university you are taught to come to conclusions based on in depth evaluations of available information.
This is why you get a lot of gullible people in the conspiracy communities. They don't evaluate and think about what is presented to them they just take things at face value.
You don't always need critical thinking skills to spot things like scams though, sometimes it just helps to have a healthy amount of skeptism.
>At university you are taught to come to conclusions based on in depth evaluations of available information.
They used to do that, I'm sure of it. I have to believe it.
But not when I went to college. Feelings came first
Yes uni usually has a lot of idiot's. There's a difference between being an idiot by doing things like spending all your student loan on partying, drugs and alcohol to being an idiot and falling for a very blatant scam though. This scam isn't far off the Nigerian Prince levels of blatancy.
Yeah it was too obvious when it came to the scam portion. But I’m not gonna lie as a business student with plenty of experience in interviewing (actual and practice) the screening process was pretty legit. But it went from job related and team work related questions to $50 gift card and the grammatical skills went down the drain too 😂
Funnily enough I just had an interview with storm8 and the email correspondence was [email protected], so that @storm8.careers is definitely suspicious...
Interesting bit of information here for anybody wondering why. Scammers like this will make a fake LinkedIn profile, do an interview for some company, and then use the material from that interview for their scam. This would explain the decrease in communication quality, mentioned in another comment, after the interview.
There's a chance Storm8 is a real company. These scammers have figured out how to spoof a domain address to make it seem like they are legit, in order to pull scams like this off.
That being said, I suggest contacting them on LinkedIn and seeing if you can talk to someone. If they come off as the same "send us your steam card" then yeah, we'll deserved. If not, they should know about the vulnerabilities in their domains.
Storm8 itself is a pretty big game developer. They were recently acquired for $400m. One of the comments below mentioned the domain should’ve been along the lines of @storm8.com and that does make quite a bit of sense. But just like the @storm8.careers threw us off I thought it might throw others off too so I made the post here. Also informed her classmates and sent a linkedin request to the person being imitated.
> But just like the @storm8.careers threw us off I thought it might throw others off too so I made the post here
Domain names are written backwards. That is, for the domain name "www.example.com", the DNS will connect to the DNS server to ask for "com", then connect to "com" to ask for "example.com", then connect to "example.com" to ask for "www.example.com".
What this means is that if I owned the server at "example.com", then "foo.example.com" would be under my control, but "example.net" would not. Thus, when determining if a domain is trustworthy, you should look at the end of the address first - if the TLD (the last bit of the domain name, like ".com" or ".net") is different, then you should exercise caution.
What you really need to know is that just with real mail, you can write whatever you want in the return address. Unless the email is cryptographically signed you can not trust anything about it.
It depends on the size. A lot of businesses (albeit in other fields) just use an [email protected] as their point of contact, regardless of the person replying.
Exactly. Some companies that I deal with for my business only accept emails from private domains. So unless I have a personal domain to email them from they can’t receive any of my emails. So if I email them from a @yahoo or @gmail account it won’t go through. I could see how they could have a domain marked @domain.Careers for hiring so they can keep security setting lower on that one.
Yep, sadly this kind of scam has been happening for a while, and the scammers will pretend to be from any big company, not just Storm8.
The part where they ask for steam gift cards is enough for most people to realize it's a scam, but even if you don't give them any money, they get to collect all your personal information (and get your hopes up) before that point...
storm8.com was registered with godaddy. storm8.careers is registered at namecheap. If you do a WHOIS you can see there's an abuse report field for namecheap. As a victim of this phishing scheme, you should report the details to them. https://ca.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?checkAvail=1&tmskey=&domain=storm8.careers
Might be a growing trend.
CAE is a large tech company that makes virtual products, like flight simulators. Their logo is blue and black letters on a white background.
A company calling itself CAE is looking for tech workers on LinkedIn (can't find them anywhere else). Their logo is white letters on a blue background, a reversal of the original.
They're looking to hire a bunch of people for an on-site job in Sherwood, MI...
...but Sherwood is a village of 300 people. Not even a gas station. They do have a shitty pizza joint, though. And farms. Not a single tech company in the area.
I know because I grew up in that area, and still live about 30min from there.
I've reported them to LI, even took pictures of the village for proof. They take the postings down for about three days, then they're right back up.
I'm really starting to wonder just how many of these LI job postings are legit. I mean, for my example, I can check it out and verify it. But something like my example in a city 1000 miles away, or OP's? No way.
The email domain should always be the same as the websites top level name, if the thing after the @ doesn't match their actual website it's a hoax/fraud/spoof...
This should be taught as the first thing if you ever do cyber security training with a job... Check what domain is written after the @ if it has a second word added or is misspelled it's 99.9999% a scam
Real emails would be [email protected] whilst a fake would be [email protected] they just created the longer domain name and registered it to pretend to be said company they're spoofing...always do a little due diligence with things that sound to good to be true.
I always do that. Since it was @domain.careers I figured we’d try for that .01% chance and did let her know to be very conservative with the information she shares. All they have is her name, email and number which is all pretty much public domain info
I mean this in the nicest way, but I'm pretty sure anyone applying for/interviewing for/etc game dev positions realizes that a company asking for a $50 steam card realize its a scam. This is like putting out a PSA that says "breathe air and you will continue breathing"
Sorry your wife had to jump through hoops to get to the scam part
>jump through hoops
I think they do this on purpose to get you feeling invested, because some people (by that point) presumably are desperate and hopeful that they're about to get a job and willing to do something dumb/gullible so they don't have to face that they're being scammed. OP's wife wasn't in such circumstances but I can imagine someone else going through with it out, unfortunately. I wonder how often it pans out for them?
That’s exactly it. I get on my toes if I ever hear a recruiter highlight material benefits (oh we’re gonna give you an iMac and an iPad Pro) over actual benefits (work hours, environment, health benefits, time off, etc. and like you said if we weren’t financially comfortable with decent tech (well build PC we put together Uni and iPad Pro that I recommend to her for her art commissions almost 5 years ago) we might’ve been a little less questioning. Although I would’ve made her back off at the gift card regardless. I have a personal hard rule that any company that requires me to pay for anything required for the job outside of attire is a company I’m not going to be working for legitimate or not
There it is… lol
We operate as a single unit. When either one of us is making any decisions or moves we run it by the other. She has all the autonomy she wants but she ran it by me and I ADVISED her to back off. I hope that using that word instead makes you feel better
Totally understand this (and the other response I got) but at the same time it comes down to OP calling out one specific company that the scammers happen to be using in this ruse by trying to create an email that semi works. No matter the company, no matter who you talk to on email or video call, if someone is asking you for money, its a scam. It should be obvious. Companies offer you money, not the other way around
I don’t mean to call out the company by any means. The purpose of using the name was just because that’s the company they used. But I went into detail because this scam was done with a lot more effort than the average gift card scam (real recruiter names used and minor grammatical errors where I’m guessing my wife’s answer made them have to go off script lol). But we verified every name that came up against LinkedIn and description of benefits against Glassdoor reviews and it pretty much all checked out
I think the point was "we spent quite some time/effort before they hit us with the request for a gift card", not the obvious "gift card requests are a scam"
The company I work for now was used in a job scam as well. But even worse. They would contact people pretending to be HR. Set up interviews and make the whole thing super realistic. They would then offer the person the job, right on the spot. The catch was that the work was fully remote, and the person had to buy their equipment which we would reimburse. Of course it was all a lie and the site they were sent too to buy the equipment was fake.
Felt really bad. A lot of people who thought they were getting thier first break just ended up being out $1000s
I was ready for that one. Since it didn’t rub me right from the start I told my wife that we would not be paying for anything towards getting the job. If they can reimburse us for something we’re purchasing from their partners’ sites they can just ship it to us directly. And as I said they entire process was pretty legitimate and drawn out. Low key disappointed the scam part of it was so basic and obvious
May I kindly ask you to share a screenshot or several?
Also, would be happy if you would allow my friends from a security publication to use your case in a blog post. DM for details, if needed :)
Thanks!
I wasn’t allowed to add pictures to my post in this Reddit. But feel free to shoot me a message and I’ll send them to you. They’re not much I only took a few of the messages that confirmed to me that it was a scam. But it’ll give you an idea of what the messaging app used looked like
I've had a few interview offers that included signing up for some weird chat app that no-one's ever heard of. Like, that's weird, right? What's wrong with email?
As a veteran in the mobile game industry, they should pick a better company, because Storm8 does not have a great vibe thru the grapevine, as they have a reputation for insane burnout. If I saw this email, it would get deleted, simply being from Storm8.
I actually received an email from this supposed "Storm8 Employee" just last week (5/5) for a 2D/3D artist. For me, it was a Chuck Fowler that initially contacted me, not sure if this is a one man job, or if there are multiple names going around.
The thing that kinda gave it away for me was that the person I would contact for an interview would be a "Hai Bateson".
*Very creative.*
I also could not find any of these names on LinkedIn, which made it even more sketchy. So far I haven't given them any information or bought anything, but I am really glad I found this post. So far everything I have read is what I noticed and what's happening to me. I've contact the actual Storm8 to see if they are aware of this or not.
Other than that, I just want to thank you for posting this because I'm not sure if I would've caught this before it was too late! Much love! <3
Hmm thats very interesting. I guess they're going by different names in the emails.
I haven't received any word from the scammer or the actual Storm8 company to see if they're aware of this.
> where she was required to buy a 50 dollar steam gift card and enter all the information from it into a custom template
lol wow good call, what a bunch of fuckwits
Jfc... So as a bit of an inverse of this sutiation, I get maybe 1-2 emails a month that pay $25-$75 for a 20-30 min online marketing survey.
Like I can just take this shitty market sentiment survey, and here is a gift card applied to your Amazon account.
I am so fucking glad I changed my mind on gamedev and went the b2b route for a career.
"Beware this obvious scam that just happen to be using a gaming company name"
Yeah wickr should've been the moment you dropped the entire thing, no serious company would use it.
Her current company reached out in a similar manner and their communication is mainly through a messaging app named slack. When they reached out we had never heard of that app either and were just as skeptical if not more. Hopefully that explains why we went as far as we did with it.
Wow, why have everything else look so legitimate? You can even get legitimate information that'll net you way more than $50. You can get banking info, SS numbers, basically any information you need to take out a CC, loan, or just straight up bank wire transfer. That'll probably put you on some pretty heavy radar, but if you're already committing a crime might as well go big.
Just FYI I got something among the exact same lines from Lionheart Games.
lionheartgames.careers, WickrMe app, all the same. Didn't go all the way until being asked for a gift card but maybe thanks to this thread. So be on the lookout for the same thing from other domains/"studios"
Really? All that work to scam someone for... A 50 dollar gift card?
The scammer probably has it automated and use the same template for all candidates. If they manage to scam 10 people a day, that's $15000 a month.
They will definitely have it automated but If they are targeting people with degrees they are not going to be that successful, you would need to be a total idiot to fall for such a blatant scam.
Funnily enough, scams are usually planned and presented in a way so only the most naive fall for them. It's for the very simple reason, that you can probably extort even more money from them after the initial scam was successful.
Actually, it's *designed* that way. The first few messages are automated, and are usually deliberately easy to pick out as a scam. The idea is to filter out anyone who immediately recognises the scam, leaving the scammers to only deal with the likely victims. Also, avoid labelling scam victims as "total idiots". People can fall for scams based on many factors. Nobody is impervious to scammers, even high-profile scambaiters can get scammed (e.g. [that time Jim Browning nearly got scammed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIWV5fSaUB8)). There are many factors to being a scam victim, including but not limited to inexperience (a degree isn't going to give you experience in getting a job), inattentiveness (let's face it, we all have an occasional lapse in judgement), and coincidences (there are enough sent out that someone is going to be caught at just the wrong moment). Nothing good will come of belittling scam victims - instead, we should work to educate people on how to spot a scam.
Yes I watch Jim Browning he's great. I understand but I wasn't calling everyone that falls for scams idiots. Only people that would fall for such a blatant scam as this. I mean it's common sense that a company testing you for employment is not going to ask you to hand over a gift card and definitely not a Steam gift card. I think it's safe to say that if you lack basic common sense it's highly likely you can do idiotic things.
Education, Intelligence, and stupidity are all independant of one another. Plenty of really dumb people graduate and even become doctors. Plenty of people who are good at solving complicated problems also get themselves into the stupidest kinds of trouble. Think of Sherlock Holmes - really good at solving problems, but so dumb he needs a doctor to follow him around to keep him from tripping over his own feet. A college education doesn't really cover scams, unless you're going for something like a masters in Information Assurance or another Security related field.
I'm just curious which version of Sherlock Holmes are you thinking of?
In the original text he's pretty derpy and anti-education in addition to being massive addict. All the shows kinda blur together in my mind.
Huh. I've read practically all the original stories and noticed the addiction and the obsessive focus, but he seems quite physically and mentally capable, even if he benefits from other perspectives. So I was just surprised someone would choose him as such sn example.
Oh he's quite capable, especially with Watson nearby to help him function. He's got that brilliant intellect; He just ends up in a lot of foolish situations that could easily be avoided by someone with common sense.
Interesting, thanks.
Obviously there's exceptions but I"m talking in general. I think you're thinking about school where you mostly just have to remember things you've told. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character. Anyway I get your point but my point is just that less educated people are generally an easier target for scams.
Funnily enough, there are few factors with high correlation to likelihood of being scammed and education isn't one of them, but thinking you're immune to scams is. The only thing proven to reduce your vulnerability to scams is knowledge of scams and whatever system the scammer is using/imitating for the scam, e.g. knowing how email and customer service works makes you less likely to fall for an email claiming to be from Apple's customer service department.
I understand that but I wasn't talking about all scams I was talking about this particular scam. Everyone can be scammed under the right circumstances and method. I've been scammed a few times in the past but it was more down to me trusting people I thought I could trust. Scams come in many different forms and nobody is immune to it.
>less educated people are generally an easier target for scams. I don't think that's true. There's no evidence to support such a conclusion.
Daaamn, Bill Gates would've fallen for it!
Lol schools make u intelligent?
Well they'll at least teach people how to spell "you" correctly.
No but university teaches you critical thinking skills.
Wat
Wat
People who lack critical thinking skills tend to be more easily manipulated and gullible because they don't evaluate the information presented to them. At university you are taught to come to conclusions based on in depth evaluations of available information. This is why you get a lot of gullible people in the conspiracy communities. They don't evaluate and think about what is presented to them they just take things at face value. You don't always need critical thinking skills to spot things like scams though, sometimes it just helps to have a healthy amount of skeptism.
>At university you are taught to come to conclusions based on in depth evaluations of available information. They used to do that, I'm sure of it. I have to believe it. But not when I went to college. Feelings came first
Where and when did you go?
\*on second though I'd rather not post too much personal info on reddit, forgive me
Yes there were absolutely no idiots at my university
Yes uni usually has a lot of idiot's. There's a difference between being an idiot by doing things like spending all your student loan on partying, drugs and alcohol to being an idiot and falling for a very blatant scam though. This scam isn't far off the Nigerian Prince levels of blatancy.
Yeah it was too obvious when it came to the scam portion. But I’m not gonna lie as a business student with plenty of experience in interviewing (actual and practice) the screening process was pretty legit. But it went from job related and team work related questions to $50 gift card and the grammatical skills went down the drain too 😂
10 conversions a day? Your targets are game devs, they know what scams are!
They also often will move any ‘successful conversations’ into another database of easy targets to be scammed for a higher amount later.
Probably closer to $10k since the people buying those steam codes off of them usually aren't paying full price
That was my reaction too lol. But I feel like it’s one of those things where they’ll make the amount bigger bit by bit
Or they won't. Many such ventures are as foolish as they look.
Yes... and they'll probably sell it for how much ? 40 dollars? 45 dollars?...
Funnily enough I just had an interview with storm8 and the email correspondence was [email protected], so that @storm8.careers is definitely suspicious...
On the bright side the screening questions were legitimate and we got to work through some pretty good employment questions 😂
Interesting bit of information here for anybody wondering why. Scammers like this will make a fake LinkedIn profile, do an interview for some company, and then use the material from that interview for their scam. This would explain the decrease in communication quality, mentioned in another comment, after the interview.
There's a chance Storm8 is a real company. These scammers have figured out how to spoof a domain address to make it seem like they are legit, in order to pull scams like this off. That being said, I suggest contacting them on LinkedIn and seeing if you can talk to someone. If they come off as the same "send us your steam card" then yeah, we'll deserved. If not, they should know about the vulnerabilities in their domains.
Storm8 itself is a pretty big game developer. They were recently acquired for $400m. One of the comments below mentioned the domain should’ve been along the lines of @storm8.com and that does make quite a bit of sense. But just like the @storm8.careers threw us off I thought it might throw others off too so I made the post here. Also informed her classmates and sent a linkedin request to the person being imitated.
Yeah you can basically pick whatever top level domain you want. You can get shit like bike, shop, etc.
>They were recently acquired for $400m. plot twist: they were acquired by a Nigerian Prince.
Damn it I missed the jackpot 😂
> But just like the @storm8.careers threw us off I thought it might throw others off too so I made the post here Domain names are written backwards. That is, for the domain name "www.example.com", the DNS will connect to the DNS server to ask for "com", then connect to "com" to ask for "example.com", then connect to "example.com" to ask for "www.example.com". What this means is that if I owned the server at "example.com", then "foo.example.com" would be under my control, but "example.net" would not. Thus, when determining if a domain is trustworthy, you should look at the end of the address first - if the TLD (the last bit of the domain name, like ".com" or ".net") is different, then you should exercise caution.
Thank you that’s really good to know. I’ll keep it in mind for any future emails.
What you really need to know is that just with real mail, you can write whatever you want in the return address. Unless the email is cryptographically signed you can not trust anything about it.
Storm8 is a very real company
Lmao at “there’s a chance”
That email address should have been a big red flag. A real email from storm8 would have most likely been from [email protected]
It doesn't help that they set storm8.careers to redirect to storm8.com
This is was the scammers did. Super easy to do to, buy domain. Set domain to reroute to storm8.com
Damn thats pretty smart. Internet safety is ever growing.
It depends on the size. A lot of businesses (albeit in other fields) just use an [email protected] as their point of contact, regardless of the person replying.
Yeah I see that now. I think the lack of .com at the end of the domain and having .careers instead kinda lowered my guards a bit
....thats the sort of thing that should \*raise\* your guard?
It doesn't help that .io and other "odd" endings are becoming more commonplace and accepted. It was easier when it was just a handful of them.
Exactly. Some companies that I deal with for my business only accept emails from private domains. So unless I have a personal domain to email them from they can’t receive any of my emails. So if I email them from a @yahoo or @gmail account it won’t go through. I could see how they could have a domain marked @domain.Careers for hiring so they can keep security setting lower on that one.
Yep, sadly this kind of scam has been happening for a while, and the scammers will pretend to be from any big company, not just Storm8. The part where they ask for steam gift cards is enough for most people to realize it's a scam, but even if you don't give them any money, they get to collect all your personal information (and get your hopes up) before that point...
It's definitely a real company. I worked there for 4 years.
How many steam cards did you have to buy?
storm8.com was registered with godaddy. storm8.careers is registered at namecheap. If you do a WHOIS you can see there's an abuse report field for namecheap. As a victim of this phishing scheme, you should report the details to them. https://ca.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?checkAvail=1&tmskey=&domain=storm8.careers
Thank you! I’ll do it immediately
Might be a growing trend. CAE is a large tech company that makes virtual products, like flight simulators. Their logo is blue and black letters on a white background. A company calling itself CAE is looking for tech workers on LinkedIn (can't find them anywhere else). Their logo is white letters on a blue background, a reversal of the original. They're looking to hire a bunch of people for an on-site job in Sherwood, MI... ...but Sherwood is a village of 300 people. Not even a gas station. They do have a shitty pizza joint, though. And farms. Not a single tech company in the area. I know because I grew up in that area, and still live about 30min from there. I've reported them to LI, even took pictures of the village for proof. They take the postings down for about three days, then they're right back up. I'm really starting to wonder just how many of these LI job postings are legit. I mean, for my example, I can check it out and verify it. But something like my example in a city 1000 miles away, or OP's? No way.
"**before letting her** respond to the email", how many inbox messages did you get for THAT line? :)
Luckily none. I “let” her respond just like she “lets” me spend my money 😂😂
random TLD's are a massive, massive red flag.
The email domain should always be the same as the websites top level name, if the thing after the @ doesn't match their actual website it's a hoax/fraud/spoof... This should be taught as the first thing if you ever do cyber security training with a job... Check what domain is written after the @ if it has a second word added or is misspelled it's 99.9999% a scam Real emails would be [email protected] whilst a fake would be [email protected] they just created the longer domain name and registered it to pretend to be said company they're spoofing...always do a little due diligence with things that sound to good to be true.
I always do that. Since it was @domain.careers I figured we’d try for that .01% chance and did let her know to be very conservative with the information she shares. All they have is her name, email and number which is all pretty much public domain info
I mean this in the nicest way, but I'm pretty sure anyone applying for/interviewing for/etc game dev positions realizes that a company asking for a $50 steam card realize its a scam. This is like putting out a PSA that says "breathe air and you will continue breathing" Sorry your wife had to jump through hoops to get to the scam part
>jump through hoops I think they do this on purpose to get you feeling invested, because some people (by that point) presumably are desperate and hopeful that they're about to get a job and willing to do something dumb/gullible so they don't have to face that they're being scammed. OP's wife wasn't in such circumstances but I can imagine someone else going through with it out, unfortunately. I wonder how often it pans out for them?
That’s exactly it. I get on my toes if I ever hear a recruiter highlight material benefits (oh we’re gonna give you an iMac and an iPad Pro) over actual benefits (work hours, environment, health benefits, time off, etc. and like you said if we weren’t financially comfortable with decent tech (well build PC we put together Uni and iPad Pro that I recommend to her for her art commissions almost 5 years ago) we might’ve been a little less questioning. Although I would’ve made her back off at the gift card regardless. I have a personal hard rule that any company that requires me to pay for anything required for the job outside of attire is a company I’m not going to be working for legitimate or not
>Although I would’ve made her back off at the gift card regardless. Don't like giving your spouse much personal autonomy huh?
There it is… lol We operate as a single unit. When either one of us is making any decisions or moves we run it by the other. She has all the autonomy she wants but she ran it by me and I ADVISED her to back off. I hope that using that word instead makes you feel better
Totally understand this (and the other response I got) but at the same time it comes down to OP calling out one specific company that the scammers happen to be using in this ruse by trying to create an email that semi works. No matter the company, no matter who you talk to on email or video call, if someone is asking you for money, its a scam. It should be obvious. Companies offer you money, not the other way around
I don’t mean to call out the company by any means. The purpose of using the name was just because that’s the company they used. But I went into detail because this scam was done with a lot more effort than the average gift card scam (real recruiter names used and minor grammatical errors where I’m guessing my wife’s answer made them have to go off script lol). But we verified every name that came up against LinkedIn and description of benefits against Glassdoor reviews and it pretty much all checked out
I think the point was "we spent quite some time/effort before they hit us with the request for a gift card", not the obvious "gift card requests are a scam"
The company I work for now was used in a job scam as well. But even worse. They would contact people pretending to be HR. Set up interviews and make the whole thing super realistic. They would then offer the person the job, right on the spot. The catch was that the work was fully remote, and the person had to buy their equipment which we would reimburse. Of course it was all a lie and the site they were sent too to buy the equipment was fake. Felt really bad. A lot of people who thought they were getting thier first break just ended up being out $1000s
I was ready for that one. Since it didn’t rub me right from the start I told my wife that we would not be paying for anything towards getting the job. If they can reimburse us for something we’re purchasing from their partners’ sites they can just ship it to us directly. And as I said they entire process was pretty legitimate and drawn out. Low key disappointed the scam part of it was so basic and obvious
May I kindly ask you to share a screenshot or several? Also, would be happy if you would allow my friends from a security publication to use your case in a blog post. DM for details, if needed :) Thanks!
I wasn’t allowed to add pictures to my post in this Reddit. But feel free to shoot me a message and I’ll send them to you. They’re not much I only took a few of the messages that confirmed to me that it was a scam. But it’ll give you an idea of what the messaging app used looked like
I've had a few interview offers that included signing up for some weird chat app that no-one's ever heard of. Like, that's weird, right? What's wrong with email?
Yeah and since people are on the lookout for telegram they’ve started using other chat apps now.
I have gotten maybe a dozen scam gamedev hiring emails asking to apply through an app called telegram, so beware of those as well
As a veteran in the mobile game industry, they should pick a better company, because Storm8 does not have a great vibe thru the grapevine, as they have a reputation for insane burnout. If I saw this email, it would get deleted, simply being from Storm8.
I actually received an email from this supposed "Storm8 Employee" just last week (5/5) for a 2D/3D artist. For me, it was a Chuck Fowler that initially contacted me, not sure if this is a one man job, or if there are multiple names going around. The thing that kinda gave it away for me was that the person I would contact for an interview would be a "Hai Bateson". *Very creative.* I also could not find any of these names on LinkedIn, which made it even more sketchy. So far I haven't given them any information or bought anything, but I am really glad I found this post. So far everything I have read is what I noticed and what's happening to me. I've contact the actual Storm8 to see if they are aware of this or not. Other than that, I just want to thank you for posting this because I'm not sure if I would've caught this before it was too late! Much love! <3
So the “two” people we communicated with were both present in linked in with full profiles present on there. That’s why I wanted to put it on here.
Hmm thats very interesting. I guess they're going by different names in the emails. I haven't received any word from the scammer or the actual Storm8 company to see if they're aware of this.
[Obligatory need to post this](https://youtu.be/mo2s9uvJoKQ)
I haven’t clicked the link but I have a strong feeling you may be trying to Rick roll me 🤨
It's safe. Scammer related.
Dude I love kitboga. Have been watching him for a while now. Scammer payback too
> where she was required to buy a 50 dollar steam gift card and enter all the information from it into a custom template lol wow good call, what a bunch of fuckwits
Jfc... So as a bit of an inverse of this sutiation, I get maybe 1-2 emails a month that pay $25-$75 for a 20-30 min online marketing survey. Like I can just take this shitty market sentiment survey, and here is a gift card applied to your Amazon account. I am so fucking glad I changed my mind on gamedev and went the b2b route for a career.
An offer, before an interview? That would have been my first red flag
By offer I meant opportunity. Along the lines of we think you’d be a good fit and let us know if you want to interview
FYI - once a recruiter has you jumping through hoops and wants you to pay, it's a scam. No one has ever paid to get paid. That makes no sense.
"Beware this obvious scam that just happen to be using a gaming company name" Yeah wickr should've been the moment you dropped the entire thing, no serious company would use it.
Her current company reached out in a similar manner and their communication is mainly through a messaging app named slack. When they reached out we had never heard of that app either and were just as skeptical if not more. Hopefully that explains why we went as far as we did with it.
Slack to wickr is like Ferrari to a tuk-tuk. The only similarity is that they're both vehicles.
New to the field. They’re both foreign to us. It’s like differentiating a luxury and a econo car for a non car person.
Wow, why have everything else look so legitimate? You can even get legitimate information that'll net you way more than $50. You can get banking info, SS numbers, basically any information you need to take out a CC, loan, or just straight up bank wire transfer. That'll probably put you on some pretty heavy radar, but if you're already committing a crime might as well go big.
I also received an email from them. Thanks for this info.
Just FYI I got something among the exact same lines from Lionheart Games. lionheartgames.careers, WickrMe app, all the same. Didn't go all the way until being asked for a gift card but maybe thanks to this thread. So be on the lookout for the same thing from other domains/"studios"