Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Beware 24-MAG

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
24-MAG logo

24-MAG appears to be yet another in a long string of fake hiring identity theft scams. Beware! Since they are routing people through mercor I have to also question the legitimacy of that site as well. Hadn’t heard of it linked it in their email to me. Yes, I’ve written about hiring scams on this blog before.

Please take note of the address.

Red Flag One

No person to person interview. Everybody can Zoom or whatever today. Only scams try to automate hiring with AI or email only interviews.

Red Flag Two

High billing rate for 100% remote work that is not defined. The dirty little secret is that most Open-Source developers aren’t paid at all. Yes Red Hat, Canonical, and others put out Open-Source and have developers on staff, to work on their commercial server platforms. The desktops are just a bit of marketing which is why they are so often busted hunks of doo-doo like Ubuntu 24.04. Tried to force a Wayland implementation with a truly wretched X11 support interface so oceans of apps cannot open main windows.

Red Flag Three – 24-MAG LTD

I told you to take note of the address above. This gets better.

You will note the officer name matches the one in the email. This company is supposedly in the UK, but email says Wyoming. Only a foreign born (and living) scammer would consider running a scam from Wyoming. It’s an Open Carry state. No need to wait around for cops and a judge so they say.

Told you this got better. A Turkish citizen, living in Germany, launches a business in the UK, which magically creates a business with a similar name in Wyoming.

My Response

The BBB has zero info on you.

So, provide me with both an EIN and your D&B number so I can validate this is not yet another scam. Should you be unable to do this, then I will have to make a shiny new blog post about this. Last I checked there were something like 60K subscribers to my geek blog.

Summary

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I have not heard back.

There are a lot of scam job sites popping up. Seems to be new ones every week. Once they have you fill out a W-9 and a direct deposit form, they have your identity. Really dangerous for you now, during tax season, when they can take these freshly filled forms and file a false tax return claiming you were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and are due a huge refund because you also listed zero deductions.

If Özlem Yalta is even a real name it needs to be on a terrorism watch list because identity theft helps fund terrorism.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.