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I recently received this email through Hotmail, and very nearly believed it if not for the suspicion that this came from a Hotmail account and the fact that I couldn’t find anything about Corposerve International on the internet at all.

—–Original Message—–
From: corposerve inc [mailto:corposerve@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 1:20 PM
Subject: Electronic Labour Exchange

We at CorpoServe International Inc have viewed your “work seeker (skill) profile” on the Government of Canada’s “Electronic Labour Exchange”, and are willing to offer you a position of employment with our company. Although this employment position is not in your specific field, we feel that you have the skills and knowledge needed for this rewarding career position.

Job Title: Regional Banking Manager (Canada Branch)

Annual Gross Salary: $45, 600 (Canadian) paid on a monthly basis ($3, 800 per month).

You will be given complete instructions on each duty you will be required to do, each and every single step, from the beginning to the end. You will be instructed and trained by CorpoServe via email correspondence on how to complete each of the job duties mentioned below.

-Banking (depositing cheques, making money orders, etc.)
-Mailing (mailing out the money orders to the required recipients)
-Setting up business bank accounts -Setting up tax accounts and business licenses
-Signing various forms, documents and contracts upon approval by CorpoServe.
-Communicating with CorpoServe through email on a daily basis

If you are interested in this employment position and would like more information about CorpoServe, please open the following attachments provided with this email:

Company Profile (4 pages)
Employee Profile and Contract (4 pages)

Both the attachments are in Microsoft Word 97, and are in rich-text format, thereby allowing you to view the files with whatever version of Microsoft Word you have. If for some reason you cannot open these attachments, email us at corposerve@hotmail.com and we will send it to you in another format. We look forward to you applying for our job offer.

Regards,

Peter T. Welling
Senior Manager of Human Resources
CorpoServe International Inc.

They actually explained the Hotmail account quite well in the document that they attached:

…
CorpoServe has a joint-promotion agreement with Microsoft/MSN that gives us unlimited email space and advanced security (since we deal with banking and finance), and in return we use corposerve@hotmail.com as our corporate email address. When you send us a message at corposerve@hotmail.com, it acts as a filter, and forwards your message to one of our head office reps.
…

Unfortunately for them, I don’t blindly email people my personal information and scanned signature . So I emailed Hotmail staff and asked if there’s indeed such a thing as a joint-promotion agreement with MSN. The result: Their email account got suspended for abuse.

This came in my inbox the next day:

—–Original Message—–
From: CorpoServe Inc [mailto:tech_corposerve@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 2:30 PM
Subject: Electronic Labour Exchange

NOTICE:

As of Friday May 14, 2004 CorpoServe has changed our main email (corposerve@hotmail.com). This email is no longer active. Our new email is the following:

email_corposerve@hotmail.com

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you sent CorpoServe any emails from Friday May 14 to Monday May 17, 2004, we would not have received them. Please re-email if you sent us anything, whether it be your completed and signed employee profile application, questions, etc. Also, do not press “REPLY” when re-emailing, press your “NEW EMAIL” button when replying to us, since this email was sent from our tech department. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,
Katherina Solokova
VP of Employee Services
CorpoServe International Inc.

These guys are persistent, and I’m sure some people would actually believe them, especially since they somehow managed to find out that I had a profile on a government job site.

So, I just thought I’d post this on the internet to warn people who also receive these kind of emails and are tempted to send in scanned signatures. Beware of the new generation of scams, very clever and getting harder to detect.

Corposerve

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