The Petra Tour Scam – A Case Study

Froyd O’Lante looks closer at what appears to be a Check Cashing scam, in the form of a job offer from a company called Petra-Tour who claim to be a

“…privately held professional travel management corporation specializing in leisure and business travel planning…”

We have seen some similar scams in the recent past, including Advan, Atez Tours and Transbridge Inc. Is this one the same?

Ground Work

Initially the website www.petra-tour.org could pass off as a legitimate site. It seems relatively professional, but on closer examination things seem a little off. First off is the WHOIS information on the website – this is public information on a domain – tells us that despite the company apparently being founded in 2001, the domain was registered in June 2009, only a couple of months ago from writing this article, when the emails advertising the company job started to circulate.
Also the web designer for this company wasn’t doing his job properly; the descriptive tags that let search engines know what the site is about are left to the default tags provided by Joomla, the company that provided the website to the scammers.

On the actual website itself it is promoting holiday deals, only the “Book Today” links don’t do anything. Taking a look at the source code of the website it is apparent that the links actually just take the user to the top of the homepage – hardly useful. So in reality this site is just for show – you cannot book anything from this site.

This and there are multiple posts about Petra Tour on sites like scam.com and others show a plethora of users criticising the offer as fraudulent.

The Scam- Baiting

Back to the actual scam, the first contact between the victim and scammer is from an email that is sent to the victim pretending to be a job offer from Letisha Gosser. Petra Tour claim to have gotten your CV from a website (typically CareerBuilder) and that they have reviewed it and concluded that you would be suitable for the post of Tour Manager – this initial email (or at least a variant thereof) is below –

From: "letisha gosser"
Subject: job offer Re:

Tourist agency "Petra Tour" has vacancy for position as "TourManager".

We received your CV from careerbuilder.com so now we offer you opportunity to work for our company. It's not Spam and it's sentonly to you as you were chosen among so many candidates.
About us. Petra Tour was founded in 2001 and Head office is located in Sweden. We are part of the best 10 tourist agencies in Europe.We have been working in USA since 2006.
About Job. You will be official representative of our company in USA Your duty is supporting our american clients during their tours around Europe. We don't require any special knowledge from you. Our manager will train you and will be happy to assist any time.

We encourage our employees who carries out responsibly in their work. Your monthly salary will be $4000 USD but in the future it will be increased. It's a part-time job you have to work only 3-4 hours daily.
We provide you career opportunity, after 3 months employment we review the results if our clients are pleased with your work your salary will be increased and you will be promoted. So your career will depend on how you cope with a task. If you are interested in this job you can email us letisha.gosser@petra-tour.org after that we will send you particulars of the job

You can tell from the email that the creator doesn’t really have a good grasp of the English language, with multiple grammar mistakes, which is usually a significant red flag when looking for scam job offers. Also the claim that they are in the top ten tourists agencies in Europe is untrue, since no one has even heard of them. I wanted to dig a little further, so my response to the email was –

Hello

Yes I am interested in this job. Where do we go from here?

Regards

Short and sweet, to which the immediate response was

I am informing you that we have received and reviewed your profile and you are qualified for the position of Tour Manager position, commencing August 26, on the terms set forth in job description enclosed. Various benefits offered by our organization to new employees are described in attachments to this letter.

You also can visit our website here: http://petra-tour.org/

If you would like to apply for this job offer please do the following steps
1. Read JOB OFFER (find enclosed file).
2. If you agree with terms of job offer go to step 3.
3. Send me e-mail contains this text.

I, [ your name ] agree with terms of job offer and want to apply to this position.

MM, DD, YEAR

4. You will receive application forms and documents in 24 hours.
If you have any questions about job offer, terms or conditions, please do not hesitate to contact me directly, I will assist you at any step of recruiting process. I am very glad to see you in our team and wish you good luck.

Sincerely Yours, Letisha Gosser
mailto:letisha.gosser@petra-tour.org

The JOB OFFER.doc mentioned in this response was mainly an overview of the duties which still manages to be completely ambiguous – for example –

“You will be responsible to initiate, build and maintain long term relationships with small to reputable tourism companies and tourism operators across the world and drive sales from them.”

With no mention to the exact type of relationships I should be building, or the exact nature of the sales we should be driving, since I would be representing another tourist agency, which presumably would be a rival?
Anyway I responded –

I Froyd O'Lante agree with terms of job offer and want to apply to this position.

26/08/09



The next response goes as follows –

I have received interest note. From this point of time you are on the way of recruiting process. You will find the appendix enclosed to this e-mail:

1. APPLICATION OF EMPLOYMENT.DOC

All you have to do is just read, fill-in and send back to me via e-mail. You should be very careful with this document to exclude possible mistakes. The next step of application process will be EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT sign and PAYMENT DETAILS form. Thanks for your time and interest. If you have any other questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me at anytime. My job is to assist you throe registration process.

Sincerely Yours, Letisha Gosser

The APPLICATION OF EMPLOYMENT was a rather extensive application asking for the usual things like address, previous experience, schooling and other personal details. I filled it out, giving out bogus details. All the details right down to schooling were completely fabricated. The response -

I have received your letter and would like to write in more details to you about our company and about your work in our company. Below we will give answers to the questions that may occur:
1) Why do you use my service, why can’t your client forward money directly to the receiver? And what does my job concern with?
* The clients of our company travel all over the world. In the majority of cases people can’t plan their expenses and here the problem with cash money arises. For example: the citizen of the USA or other countries went for a vacation to Egypt. Due to some circumstances our client needs money urgently. *One can get money via ??? (Cash dispenser) using one’s credit or debit card. There’s a great disadvantage because credit and debit cards have some limit for transaction of cash in other countries. This sum is about $300USD- $500USD per day. These limitations are imposed by the bank.
*One can ask one’s friend or relative to send him some money to Egypt.
*One can use the service of our company. We accommodate this service “Money transfer” to our clients, who always use our services while traveling. With our help our clients can receive money in a couple of hours.
Our client can use on-line access to his bank account and transfer money from his account to yours. If our company appoints you to the post of Tour Manager your job will conclude in receiving our client’s money on your account. After getting money you should send it by Western Union or Money Gram to Egypt. As a result our client receives money in the shortest possible time. Money order from USA to Egypt takes a lot of time and it is practically impossible. Appointment of Tour Manager is very relevant in our travel company. “Money order” is in requisition among our clients. Egypt is only an example.
2) How could your clients commit their money to unknown person like me? If by any reason our client doesn’t receive money, our travel agency will completely compensate it. In our turn we demand this money from insurance company. This money is insured.
If our client lost money through your fault, the insurer will call you to criminal account and will give a suit to court. All your bank accounts will be blocked and you will appear in the black list of debtors. This money will be returned, be sure. After receiving money you become responsible for it. Before we employ you, our security police will check up all information that you give us to minimize a risk of our client’s money loss. So, when you will fill in APPLICATION and EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT you must give us reliable information. 3) Does your company pay taxes? Should I pay the tax from deals with the client? Do you have the license which grants you the right to be engaged in tourism? Our company pays taxes under the legislation of Sweden, because it is based in Sweden. You shouldn't pay any taxes. Our Company received the license to be engaged in tourism in 2004.

Requirements and notes:

We specified that work isn’t constant. You will receive money transfers from our clients only when it will be necessary. We will inform you in advance by email or by mobile phone if our client transfers money. In average, you will receive one money transfer from our clients per week. It’s not excluded that you will receive more transfers.

You will get your salary in 30 days after working up the first transfer. But, to get your salary you should work up at least 4 transfers from our clients per month. If you didn’t manage 4 orders per month, you would get your salary after the fourth transfer only. You will get 5% from each money transfer made by the client as a bonus. You will get your salary on your bank account. When transferring money you take back money spent for Western Union and Money Gram service.

If you do not wish to give your personal bank account you can open the separate account for work in our company.

I shall look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely Yours, Letisha Gosser

Four replies later and herein lie’s the scam. It works exactly like a cheque cashing scam, only it is a money order scam. Note where it says that the recipient will be able to keep 5% of all money transferred to them, and pass the rest on to Egypt. Problem is, once they pass the 95% on to Egypt, the initial money transfer is cancelled as it was a fraudulent exchange to begin with, only there are delays before the banks realise this. The user is then left without the initial funds from the fraudulent money transfer and is out of pocket for sending 95% of the funds straightaway back to the scammers. Note at the start of this recent reply that is highlights the urgency to send the money within hours – this is not so Petra Tours clients get the best possible service, rather than you will send the funds on before the banks realise the initial money transfer was fake!

I did send another response however, see if there was any other element to the scam. We replied saying I was uncomfortable sending my personal bank details online, but were still interested in the job – the response was

I have received your letter. You can use the personal account, in it there is nothing bad because our company works on the lawful bases. If you do not wish to use the personal account you can open the new account for work in our company. I will look forward to hearing from you.Sincerely Yours, Letisha Gosser mailto:letisha.gosser@petra-tour.org

To quote again – “because our company works on the lawful bases” – how comforting. I then forwarded fake bank details to them, but with a non-existent routing code and bank account number.
In addition to this response they send me TWO MORE forms to fill in! This is not easy work! The two forms are payment details a.k.a. your bank details (again) and a form requiring your actual signature that needs to be printed, signed and then scanned back in. Hard work and not worth doing. Will Petra Tour allow me past this part without a signature? Why do they want the signature? Many people assume that because the scammers want bank details from us, then they want to drain that bank of all the money in there, when that is not usually the case, as they need more than your account number and sort code…. like…. A signature! Is this the reason they were persistent on the signature? I don’t know yet.

The next response was this –

I have received your letter and I wish to answer you. If you wish to work in our company you should give me the information of your account or open the new account. Your account should be in USA. You understand me? Our office is in Sweden. If you still have questions, I will be glad to you to answer.
I will look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely Yours,
Letisha Gosser


They are pretty persistent on a US bank account, so off goes my fake bank information for a fake bank in Gatesville, Texas. I also queried Letisha on her name. I didn’t think Letisha sounded very Swedish? The responses now just ignore my questions and are more persistent in getting my full bank details and my signature. Now its time I think to become a little less obedient and start making some demands of my own, starting with a photo of their offices.
The responses hereon in sound more aggressive as the old calmer and helpful Letisha Gosser has been replaced with a rather demanding and impatient Letisha Gosser who responds with -

“It not seems to you, what it silly to ask me a photo?”

Not entirely sure what that means as the grammar as gone from bad to worse, but she goes on to say that she does not beg anybody to work at the company. Well okay then, but my response now states in clear terms that I am beginning to doubt how real this company is, and if they don’t send me a photo of their offices with a clear sign in the photo saying “Froyd O’Lante” then do not email me anymore as I am not interested. I think I pushed them too hard too soon. They never emailed back. Oh well it is only my first go.

Petra tour is one of many scams that involve this fake job offer premise. Other examples (likely run by the same people) include –
Advan Group LTD,
Atez Tours
TransBridge Inc.
Waltergate Exports
Walter Import Export
[will add other names as soon as I discover them] The scams are in every respect evil and conducted by people with no conscious or moral backbone. It really is pathetic in every regard that these scammers hide behind their computers trying to con money out of people who actually work for a living. Maybe we will email to ask for a face to face interview with them, but since they are wimpish cyber geeks, we don’t like our chances.

NEVER accept job offers that come into your email from specific companies that sound too good to be true. Always insist on meeting face to face before committing to any prospective employer. Scammers are generally wimps, and will avoid speaking to you over the phone or meeting with you at all costs. They typically only communicate through free web based email where they can hide behind a fake identification and cannot be traced.
Never respond to job offer emails that use free email services, like Hotmail or Yahoo. Legitimate companies either go through a credible job agency or use an email with their own domain. Never wire money to employers, even if they have sent you money. Always use your common sense and always ask an expert if you are unsure.

“Letisha Gosser” did get forwarded a full copy of this article. Hope she likes it.


Back to Scambaiting homepage.