As far as scams go, I have to say these kinds of scams are pretty bad. Preying on desperate people who have nothing left to live for and therefore are applying at KPMG job applicants with high hopes of Big 4 employment and bilking them out of untold sums of money with fake offer letters is about as slimy as you can get. Add that the scammers had the audacity to use a real KPMG office in India to do this and you get one ballsy stunt:
On October 7, eight floors below KPMG's office at the World Trade Centre building in Bangalore, an elaborate deception was underway. A bunch of impostors posing as KPMG managers interviewed, hired and issued fake offer letters to half-a-dozen job aspirants. They even asked the candidates to report to the 12th floor, the real KPMG office. By the time the candidates and the company could figure they had been duped, the impostors had left.
The unsuspecting aspirants were earlier beguiled into transferring money into a bank account.
"They had the nerve to book a business centre in the same building as our office. The proportion of this fraud is ridiculous," says Shalini Pillay, head of HR, KPMG. She hastens to add that KPMG's recruitment process is very robust. "We have codes for every applicant and even our recruiters are aware of this."
Whoever is doing this obviously isn't just your run-of-the-mill Nigerian prince, these guys are organized. They've also figured out how to make it appear as though calls to "candidates" (or, marks, more fittingly) originated from the same number as KPMG's main number.
The Economic Times notes that most candidates were small town engineers.
