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I'm currently looking for work and was contacted last week by a company interested in my LinkedIn profile.

After providing my resume and completing a questionnaire, today the company offered me the position with a sizable salary boost.

I haven't completed an application and there were no interviews, which is highly unusual - I've never gotten a job without face to face interviews.

The company, Alimentiv, which my HR contact claims to represent is legitimate. It's a clinical research organization (CRO) that does statistical analysis for clinical trials.

However something smells off. It's almost too good to be true. No interviews, a big pay raise. I'm worried this could be a scam - could someone be attempting to acquire my personal information (social security or bank account numbers)?

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    These kinds of job scams do exist, my friend got a few of them (and thankfully noticed before actually accepting a job). Check if the domain they are using is accurate, the email addresses come from the company's domain, and if similar scams are associated with this company.
    – Esther
    Nov 9 at 2:31
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    No application, no interview for a research job? All-caps SCAM.
    – David Hammen
    Nov 9 at 8:54
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    How does the scammer benefit from this whole thing?
    – Michael
    Nov 9 at 16:02
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    When in doubt, initiate a new, fresh email to a contact at the company. You go directly to their web site, find the "careers" and/or "contact us" link and send them an email. 99.999% chance their response will be, "Huh? What? No, sorry." and you'll know for certain. Same thing if you get a legit sounding call from someone representing "Company X" asking for all sorts of info - "Thanks for alerting me, I'm busy now, but I'll call back to get this taken care of" then you initiate the call to a known legitimate number for the company.
    – FreeMan
    Nov 9 at 16:34
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    They collect info, @Michael. Maybe even going so far as to collect official government ID info "for tax purposes", etc. Now they create new documents, credit cards, whatever, in your name.
    – FreeMan
    Nov 9 at 16:34

2 Answers 2

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Almost certainly yes, it is a scam.

A quick google search "Alimentiv job scam" gave me the following LinkedIn page about an open job opportunity at Alimentiv. It contains the following notice:

PHISHING SCAM WARNING: Alimentiv is aware of the continued increase of phishing scams, leveraging various methods of attack via email, text, voice and social media. Please note that Alimentiv only uses company email addresses, which contain “@ alimentiv.com ”, to communicate with candidates via email. If you are contacted by someone about an open job at Alimentiv, please verify the domain of the sender’s email address and that they are asking you to apply on this website. If you believe you’ve been a victim of a phishing scam, please contact your local government cyber authority to report.

Check the email address used to contact you. It most likely does not end with @alimentiv.com, and is indeed a scam. The rest of your description does sound like the kind of "job opportunity" scams that I've seen before.

In general, the first things to look for if a job opportunity seems "off" are if the email is coming from the stated company's domain (@alimentiv.com, here), and if similar scams are associated with this company (in this case, yes).

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    – Kilisi ♦
    Nov 10 at 9:35
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    Sender email adresses are so simple to "forge" (you simply specify the one you want). Please don't use this as the sole method of verifying whether the sender is legit.
    – arne
    Nov 11 at 15:13
  • Yes. The validation should be made by getting the company contact info from a reliable souce, and contact them to verify the offer. A wrong domain can be telling, but those can be spoofed (made to look like the legit one by swapping some unicode characters, or the fraudsters using a .com domain while the company uses a .net domain).
    – SJuan76
    Nov 11 at 15:22
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    @arne You're right to point out to be careful, but while SMTP itself does not check, the email providers do have more records than just the "FROM" field. Similar to tracked deliveries. Here's a post explaining some more background: howtogeek.com/121532/…
    – bytepusher
    Nov 11 at 16:08
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Very rarely can this be real, but it is usually not as great as described. I've had one once where there wasn't any interview, etc., but such a pay raise and everything does indeed sound quite like a scam.

As earlier suggested, I would check the email address and contact a known address verified to be from the company itself.

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