Gus Granger just emailed me with a part-time job offer that just sounds too good to be true.

Greetings,

Yours faithfully,
Recruitment Office,
FMCompany

This unsolicited email can be a sight for sore unemployed eyes. But it could also be a ticking time bomb, aka, a scam.

I searched FMCompany and found a firm called First Mortgage Company. I called the firm to make sure they had no connection to Gus’ email and, as I suspected, they did not send out the email, don’t know who Gus is and don’t have any part-time gigs available right now.

I then checked the website addresses in the email, one attached to Gus’ name — bobpond.com — and one in the body of the email — fm-company.net.

For BobPond I found a site that says, “This Web site is coming soon.” And for FM-Company I got:
“Dear Visitor, This website is Under Construction. Thank You for your understanding,
FMCOMPANY

I also emailed Gus to his “corporative” email:

Hello Gus,
I am a career columnist for MSNBC.com and I would like to talk to you about this job opportunity you mention below. Please get back to me ASAP.
The sites you include in this do not exist and I’d like to find out exactly what type of firm you work for.
Thanks,
Eve

I’ll get back to you guys once I hear for old Gus.

What do you guys think? Should a person looking for work send their resume to Gus given what I found out about this email by doing a simple Web search?

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’m going to warn all of you yet again to beware of job or work-at-home offers you get via email.

The Better Business Bureau has been warning that job scams are on the rise, big time, right now.

“We have a lot on work at home scams. In addition to rebate processing, the secret shopper scam is HUGE right now. We are hearing from people every day who lost money (and a lot of it!) to that scam,” says Alison Southwick, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Here’s a link she offered to job-scam red flags:

* Employer e-mails are rife with grammatical and spelling errors
* E-mails purporting to be from job posting Web sites claiming there’s a problem with a job hunter’s account
* An employer asks for extensive personal information such as social security or bank account numbers
* An employer offers the opportunity to become rich without leaving home
* An employer asks for money upfront
* The job requires the employee to wire money through Western Union or MoneyGram

I know many of you are desperate out there, but don’t let desperation cloud your common sense.