With the increase in communication through the internet, scammers have found ways to practice among the people. The translation industry is no exception and is vulnerable to a wide variety of scams. At times the scam happens innocently without you knowing, only to find out after the damage is done. Unless you understand the red flags that someone might be a scammer, you could lose a lot of money and waste a lot of time as well. In this article, you will get to learn a few of the challenges related to translation scams.
Stealing of your CV
With current technology, it is easy to find a job by posting your CV online to market yourself to the translation industry. What you do not know is that someone else may take your CV and change the contact information to theirs. In turn, they get translation jobs on your behalf and continue earning. The worst happens when they are not competent to handle the work. Your reputation is impacted when scammers do low quality work since they do not care about safeguarding your name.
How to avoid the CV stealing scam
Since prevention is better than a cure, there are ways to protect your CV from scammers. One option is to avoid offering a huge amount of information. One might wonder how the CV will then attract potential clients. While writing a less detailed CV, ensure that you include the services an employer might be looking to hire you for. It is important to let the client know that some of your information has been omitted to protect from getting scammed. Scammers also are too lazy to go through a PDF document, so a PDF is an excellent way to submit your CV. A serious client will find time to open the document since their interest is quality work.
Overpayment by the client
After submitting work, how sweet it is to find that the client sent a check with a much larger amount than expected. At this point, you think that your excellent effort and commitment earned you this bonus. Later in the day, the client calls to request the extra amount be returned as they made a mistake during the transfer process. Innocently, you do as they ask only to find out that the original amount has never cleared. Both your valuable time and money have been snatched away by a scammer.
How to get rid of client check overpayment
You can avoid scammers by being strict about not accepting payment via check from translation clients. Let clients use money transfer facilities instead to ensure your safety.
Paying to get a translation job
Have you ever heard of people paying to get paid? The idea itself seems a scam, but scammers are sly and will deceive you with different tales. Some will ask for a processing fee for you to get the job. Others will ask for payment for a particular tool that comes with the job while others will talk of a course you should take for certification. You wonder why you need these things since you offer your services to other clients who don’t have these requirements, but since you want to avoid losing this client, you fall for their lies.
How to avoid the payment lies
It is simple. Work with people who are offering jobs without extra conditions. As long as you trust your skills, you are good to turn down some offers especially when offers are too good to be true.
In conclusion, there are many translation challenges, scammers being one of the most significant. Having identified some of the problems in the article, as a translator, you now have several ways to avoid getting scammed, wasting your time, risking your market reputation and losing a lot of cash.