Mon, 5 Aug 2013The boss of the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo) has warned recruiters “to take extra care in taking on international assignments” following an incident involving APSCo member Larson Group.

APSCo chief executive officer Ann Swain notes on her blog that multi-sector recruiter Larson Group had been contacted asking to supply a contractor on £1,650 per day to a client, a multinational mining company.

However, the contact email for the purported client was “subtly different” from a genuine address, and the telephone number went to a different location, where the person responding acted as it if it were the real company office.

Larson avoided the scam, but Swain notes that it is “frighteningly simple to set up domain names and email addresses that are just slightly different from legitimate ones”, and advises “that recruiters check the contact details given against the information available at Companies House, and verify the job titles of the contacts with those numbers – not the direct line numbers given by the fraudsters”.

“The simple reality is, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is,” says Swain.