Sumit Singh, a third year B.Tech student in Chennai, was left dumbfounded when he received a call asking him to pay Naukri.com for not responding to their emails. Months before this, Singh had uploaded his resume on the job portal in hopes of finding a part time job in the field of digital marketing. He continued getting emails from Naukri.com that he ignored as they were not suitable.
Sumit subsequently stopped looking for jobs and got busy with his studies but the emails continued to come.
The caller told him that the recruitment portal had issued a penalty of 49,000 rupees against him for ignoring the emails. He was told that if he failed to pay the amount, he would be taken to court and banned from applying in any multinational company for seven years.
When Sumit tried to clarify, the person on the call asked him to pay 10,000 rupees in order to evade the hefty penalty. Then he was threatened. The caller told him Naukri.com will send its people to recover the penalty amount. Singh was also given a chalan number related to his case.
Singh saw that it was clearly a scam and therefore responded to the threat call by saying, “I am not paying any amount. You are most welcome to come visit my house.”
He never received a call after this incident.
Screenshot of the message received by Sumit
With the increased adoption of technology, online frauds in the form of phishing, malware, OTP frauds, UPI frauds have also seen an exponential rise. According to Statista, 68% of the internet users in India have encountered some sort of a cybercrime in 2022.
One such rampant scam is that of online jobs.
On a LinkedIn post, when a user wrote about one such scam they encountered on Naukri.com, several people responded to it with their similar experiences. Anjali Pandey, a B.Tech student, wrote an elaborate LinkedIn post about how she was issued a fake chalan for not having a job ID.
Intimidating about “potential harm to family reputation and the possibility of a seven-year ban on documents”, Pandey was asked by the scammer to pay Rs. 7,400 to settle the matter. Neelima Kushwah, a data science student also commented on the post to share a similar experience where she was blackmailed that her documents would be sealed and her “profile will get blacklisted in every company if she fails to pay a fine of Rs 50,000”. This was because she ignored the mails from Naukri.com.
Akshay Gharte, a marketing engineer, received a fake call from TATA motors after uploading his CV on Naukri.com. After clearing two telephonic interviews, he was asked to pay “refundable charges of Rs 15,000” for documentation. “I was not aware of such scams and paid the amount. I never got the job nor my money back,” Gharte wrote on Linkedin.
Last October, Mohammad Mujahid was approached by a company called Global Star Solutions through Naukri.com for a job of data entry. The job required him to manually enter data from multiple CVs to the company’s database. The target which Mujadin got was 500 CVs in a week, for which he would be paid Rs 8,000. Mujadin readily agreed to sign up for it as it seemed a cake walk.
Little did he know, the CVs which he received would be too comprehensive to finish the target. “Each passing day, I realised that I would never be able to complete the target, even if I dedicated my entire 24 hours of the day to it,” said Mujahid. At the end of the week, the link of the company’s portal stopped working and Mujahid had just completed the data entry of 200 out of 500 CVs.
For three days, he did not receive any intimation from the company’s end. Mujahid was convinced that he would not receive any money, as he failed to complete the task. On the fourth day, he got a call from a lawyer representing Global Star Solutions. The lawyer said that as per the company’s policy, Mujahid will be sued for not delivering the task.
The lawyer said that he was in the Delhi High Court at the time and was on his way to file a complaint against Mujahid. Intimidating him about the consequences of bad reputation and hefty expenses, the lawyer offered him a solution to come out of the mess. The solution entailed giving 12,000 rupees to his employer at Global Star Solutions, as soon as possible.
Mujahid had started to panic. He started looking for solutions when he came across YouTube videos with similar cases. “I saw many videos of people who were trapped in similar scams like me. All of them forbade against succumbing to the supposed ‘lawyer’ as it was all part of a scam,” Mujahid said.
Mujahid never heard back from them. He now works for an MNC in Hyderabad.
Legal immunity of intermediaries
Cases of online job scams via recruiting websites, such as Naukri.com, are not new. Recently, Mumbai Police nabbed an accused in New Delhi who was posing as a senior Human Resource Manager of Naukri.com and promised recruitment in Merchant Navy and other jobs to dozens of students. The accused had cheated students of lakhs of rupees.
However, it must be noted that the Indian Penal Code provides immunity to intermediaries (which in this case is Naukri.com) in matters of such offences. These amendments were made part of Section 79 of the IT Act which provided “immunity to intermediaries in connection with content made available from third parties”.
The amendments were the result of the judgment of the Avinsh Bajaj v. State (NCT) of Delhi, popularly known as the Baazee.com case. In 2004, Avnish Bajaj, CEO of Baazee.com, an online auction website, was booked on the charges of obscenity (Section 292) as an obscene MMS video was listed for sale on the website. In 2005, Delhi High Court refused to quash the charges against Bajaj.
However, the Supreme Court overturned this judgment in 2012, pronouncing “safe harbour to intermediaries (such as the Website) from the penalties under the IT Act for content made available on its platform by third parties.”
Speaking to Decode, Radhika Jhilani, legal counsel at Software Freedom Law Centre pointed out that although intermediaries like Naukri.com get their safe harbour under law, they also have certain due diligence requirements. “This means that there are certain obligations that they have to fulfill to ensure that their safe harbour remains intact,” she said.
According to Section 79 of the IT Act, in order to keep the safe harbour intact, the intermediaries should not have “conspired or abetted or aided” the unlawful exploitation of the information available on its platform by any third party. It also mandates that intermediaries must “expeditiously remove or disable access to that material without vitiating the evidence in any manner”.
According to Jhilani, in the absence of a data protection law in place, the liability of these intermediaries is quite limited. “Without a data protection law, there are no sufficient data protection practices in place which would prevent the leak and misuse of sensitive personal data,” she said.
Decode reached out to Naukri.com but they have not responded to our emails yet.
How To Stay Safe
With cheaper and more access to the Internet, scammers have realised that the anonymity the web offers is the perfect vehicle for deception, making the job seekers more vulnerable to scams than ever before.
In its safety guidelines, Naukri.com enlists how to detect and report fake job offers. The dubious signs of a scammer include- asking for money, looking for confidential information, badly written job ads, easy hiring process and luring with unexpected salaries.
Decode spoke to cyber expert Rupesh Mittal who shared tips in order to detect an online job scam.
-Be wary of companies who ask for money– Companies never ask for money from job applicants. ”It is the scammers who ask for money for doing ‘background checks’ of applicants. Genuine companies always bear all the cost of pre-joining procedures,” Mittal said.
-Consultants never directly communicate- Employment websites like Naukri.com do have genuine consultants who help in communicating with companies who are their clients. “ The job of a consultant is just to put you in touch with a company and not negotiate or evaluate a candidate on behalf of them,” said Mittal. Whenever a consultant claims to represent a company and asks for money on behalf of them, one must be careful.
-Check the emails carefully- Mittal advised to open the emails, received from potential employers, on a laptop. “On receiving the email, click on the three dots on the right corner where you get an option of ‘show original’. On clicking the option, if every column on the screen has ‘PASSED’ written then it is fine,” said Mittal. If any column has ‘FAILED’ or ‘INCOMPLETE’ then the mail could be dubious.
-Always scan documents before downloading- In case one gets attachments along with fishy emails, it is always better to scan them before downloading. “The attachments may have malware which hack our entire system and get access to all personal data,” Mittal warned.
