CV Safety! Protect yourself from fraud.

From Jose Cofone - Guest Blogger and CV Expert

Our upcoming newsletter for Business Travel candidates outlines what makes a good CV. We want to make sure you also have a SAFE CV!

Identity theft is a feature of modern society that is more prevalent and features more and more often in the national media.

A recent BBC News article reports that cyber crime costs the UK £27 billion a year with civilians being defrauded to the tune of £3.1billion a year – this is up from £1.2 billion in 2008.

At New Frontiers, we receive thousands of CVs per month from job seekers worldwide and it has always struck me how freely and naïvely applicants provide sensitive personal information that criminals can utilise for identity theft and online fraud.

Most people would say they are cautious when it comes to providing personal and sensitive information but many CVs, especially candidates from the European mainland, will contain information such as National Insurance and passport numbers.

We also receive CVs detailing parents’ names. Your mother’s maiden name can be particularly useful to an identity thief as it is one of the main security questions used by banks. This information combined with your name, address and date of birth provides all of the details that criminals need for a number of activities including applying for loans in your name or hacking your bank and email accounts. These details are not required on your CV!

Due to European working law, all job applicants must be fully registered with their recruitment agency. Agencies will request proof that candidates have the legal right to live and work in the UK including copy of passports and visas or national insurance numbers. Make sure that your agency is legitimate either by using a large, well known agency or visit the “Companies’ House” website to check their authenticity at www.companieshouse.gov.uk.

As well as applying to roles advertised on job boards, a popular method of promoting your CV to the market place is by loading it on to job boards to be viewed by recruiting companies and agencies. At New Frontiers we were made aware by a number of job seekers, mainly residing in Asia, who had been emailed that they had been offered a job by tour operators on the strength of their posted CV. To accept this role all they had to do was to pay for their travel and visa. From our understanding, a number of people where caught out by this scam netting the fraudster huge rewards for little effort.

At New Frontiers, we actively promote CV safety in our CV workshops and by omitting sensitive information from any CVs that we submit to prospective employers.

Make sure that you don’t become a statistic. Most individuals are careful with their personal details but forget that their CV contains most of the information that a criminal needs. With cyber crime costing the UK economy over £27 billion a year, it is a growing crime which the criminals can commit from the luxury of their paid for, beautifully decorated, high spec homes!

For the BBC article, please visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12492309

Add comment