If you're using a Web-based third-party recruiter site to look for and apply for jobs, you may want to keep a close eye on the e-mails you get in response. As Steve Ragan of CSO reports, scammers are harvesting information from recruiter sites to offer "flexible" jobs that are in fact criminal undertakings—often posing as executives from the companies where applicants have applied for jobs.

One woman who applied for a job at the paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams through the site of ZipRecruiter received an e-mail shortly afterward from someone posing as the CEO of the company. The person claimed that the position she had applied for was filled but offered another job as a "personal assistant" for the CEO himself for $500 a week.

"If you accept my offer, I will need you to take charge of my mails pick up and drop off as well as errand running during your spare time outside of work," the e-mail read. "The job is flexible so you can do it wherever you are as long as there is a post office in the area. I will pay for the first week in advance to run errands, and will also have my mails/packages forwarded to a nearby post office where you can pick them from at your convenience."

The "job offer" was clearly part of a reshipping scam—an arrangement used frequently by credit card fraudsters and identity thieves to get goods purchased online forwarded by an unwitting third party, frequently to an overseas address. The criminals use the "personal assistant's" personal information to deliver fraudulently purchased goods; when the fraud is tracked down, the "personal assistant" is the one the police come to visit.

The target quickly identified the e-mail as a scam, as it asked her for a range of personal details that didn't make a lot of sense for a legitimate job offer—including some details she would have included in her initial application, such as her full name and address, age and gender, phone number, and e-mail address—and some that she wouldn't, such as her bank name. But she also received 20 more scam offers while her résumé was posted on ZipRecruiter—some of them in e-mails that were copied to dozens of other targets.

A ZipRecruiter spokesperson told Ragan that the company was "acutely aware" of the use of the site by scammers and was working to screen out fake employers from gaining access to résumés. ZipRecruiter employees suggested to the target of the scams that she should remove her address and phone number from her résumé; the company also removed her résumé from a database browsable by any employer.

For more on résumé-scraping scams, see Ragan's report in CSO .