Looking for full-time work has never been as tricky as it is today. The only experience I have in this area is through the old-fashioned way—responding to an ad in the paper or on the job boards.

This past June my son finished Kindergarten and hard cold reality hit–I needed to get back to work full time when my son starts first grade. I ventured out on the job boards, spent hours filling out forms, uploading my resume/cover letter and setting up automated searches—the whole nine yards.As a recent MCSA with little experience outside the Microsoft Boot Camp lab or my own little home office geekdom, it was difficult to find jobs where I met most of the requirements. I also ended up losing a nice chunk of so-called friends to “the dark side” in a rather unpleasant divorce, so my network suddenly shrunk.

One day I received an email from Dice with my ideal job opening—a tier 1 systems administrator at a marketing company called Consider This Marketing in Miami. I clicked on the link to their web site listed under Next Media Partners. The only address listed was in Orlando. The site looked okay, but a little on the light side as far as a marketing company should go. I did not see a portfolio, executive bios or as much content as one would expect from a marketing company.

Unfortunately, I am always giving people, and apparently companies, the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they are reorganizing and just opening an office in Miami. I applied for the position and heard nothing…just like so many others.

Fast forward to August and I received another email from Dice with the same job opening, thought it odd and checked out the company again. Thankfully I had been searching for a web designer for a project and noticed how complete their web sites generally are—tons of client work, decent branding and solid content. I examined all the openings listed under Consider This Marketing. Boy, business is really booming over there! This company was hiring at all levels of IT and web programming in numerous cities such as Shreveport, LA and Biloxi, MS and El Paso, TX. El Paso? I have never been there but I cannot imagine it is a hub for marketing companies.

A quick Google search of the mystery company names followed by “scam” brought up links to a variety of sites that track internet fraud. It turns out that Consider This Marketing, Next Media Partners or whatever other choice name you want to call them is a phishing scheme by Ralph Edward Bell and Alec Difrawy a.k.a. Ayman El-Difrawi. These scumbags have a long rap sheet of fraud including a fake modeling agency and a variety of fraudulent employment related companies. Apparently, they take your personal information and sell it to other unscrupulous companies. If you apply for one of their positions and notice a vast increase in email, no, you are not becoming popular. You are receiving spam.

I alerted Dice about the fraud via their “Report This Job” link…twice. I also called them and got right through…to someone’s voicemail. Today there are 110 job openings at Consider This Marketing on Dice. It seems it is too large of an account to lose. I did receive the name and email address of the person who handles complaints over at Dice and I certainly will use it, but I am not expecting any miracles. I will keep you updated. Until then, if a company seems phishy, trust your sense of smell and stay away.