With unemployment figures going up every day fuelled by, among other factors, retrenchments rocking the trucking industry, competition for the available few truck driving jobs get stiffer.
It has been alleged that in some trucking companies you will not get a job if you don’t pay your way in, and that information is shared in confidence, sometimes never reaching management.
Fake employment agencies, on the other hand, make a killing from unsuspecting job seekers promising to push their CVs to the top but you never get to be hired because they use fake jobs.
Johannesburg metro police department (JMPD) said on Wednesday that they arrested fraudsters who conned desperate job seekers.
The alarm was raised after a woman who was promised a job paid the bogus recruiters R450, JMPD spokesman Wayne Minnaar said.
“When contacting the suspects, their phones were switched off and they weren’t seen or heard of again.”
Officers arrested the three women who posed as recruiters in their “office” on the seventh floor of a building in the Johannesburg CBD, Minnaar said.
He said piles of CVs, fake application forms and R7,140 in cash were found.
A computer, printer, and four cellphones were seized.
Truck drivers have not been spared from such scams either. Many Facebook pages created in the name of prominent companies are used to dupe unsuspecting truck drivers who are out of a job.
While trucking social platforms always post warnings about the existence of these scams some desperate truck drivers take their chance and end up losing the last cent of their savings.
The three women are expected to appear in court soon.
