When Wanting a Job Can Get You Killed

Craigslist job scams take a deadly turn.

If you have been looking for a job for awhile, I'm sure that you have run into several job search scams. Typically, these kinds of scams are run on free job listing sites like Craigslist. Although there is nothing wrong with Craigslist in and of itself, because it is the most popular online classified system, it is often the target of abuse.

In the case of a recent Craigslist murder/robbery in Noble County, OH, it was a job search scam that cost much more than just some wasted time. In early November, a South Carolina man who answered an ad for a job on Craigslist was shot in the arm and robbed. He managed to escape and alert authorities. After hearing about the events on the news, another family in the area who had earlier reported their family member missing said that he was last known to be heading to a job interview that had been advertised on Craigslist.

Police searched the location of the shooting and even brought in cadaver dogs to search the surrounding area. During the search, they found the body of a man from Virginia. He was buried in a shallow, hand-dug grave. After identifying the man, they determined that he had come to Ohio in search of a job.

The police arrested two people in connection with the case. One of them was a 52 year old man and more shocking, the other was a 16 year old boy. As the story received more media coverage, other people who had applied for jobs came forward. The police have been trying to locate all of the people who applied to the listing. Since then, they have found two more bodies buried in a similar fashion in the surrounding area.

It is such a horrible thing and it can make you almost give up hope on finding a job. There will always be people who will try to make a profit off of someone else's desperation, but this takes things to a new level. I'm interested to find out more about the case and what the murderer's motivation was. It can't be simple robbery, because most unemployed people I know don't have much to steal. Perhaps it was just a good opportunity to lure people out to a remote location or because the killer had a grudge against job seekers.

Have you heard about this case? What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for ManufacturingWorkersBlog and Nexxt. Along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.