TRANSCRIPTION
Intro: Welcome to Crew Life at sea podcast. Here we will share the skills you need to make your experience and adventure out at sea a success, hear inspiring stories from the experienced crew, from all diversities, gain knowledge and know your rights. Be Part of the crew life at sea, and let’s welcome your host, Raymond Crystal.
Ray: Hi, welcome to crew life at sea. Today we are in Funchal, Madeira. The ship is docked. I thought it would be a good idea to talk about crew ship scams. So please excuse any unfortunate sounds like a guy jogging next to me, cars passing by, people ranting away while walking across me, while we’re on the streets walking, doing this podcast out and about. Sometimes it’s interesting, things can happen on the way. So there are a few topics I’d like to cover.
First let’s start with the main one, which is the email. So all of a sudden you get this email, you’ve been offered a job on this cruise ship and you’re getting this amount of money. And you need to do this and this, and all their details. So what you got to remember is that the proper way this is done, the legit way from a proper cruise liner or agency. First, you apply with the agency or you apply with the cruise ship. Then you get an email from the recruiter asking you or telling you that you’ve been shortlisted and they want to interview you. That’s the first procedure. Once that’s done they’ll set up an interview, and maybe another one. Normally there’s two. First one is your character, to see how you are as a person, to find out more about you.
The second one is more on your technical side, depending on what job. That’s the proper procedure. The fake or scam way is you get a document in an email, saying you’ve already been approved, you don’t need to be interviewed, and that’s bollocks. So if you get an email saying you’ve already been approved, you just need to pay for this and this, it’s incorrect, it’s a scam. The reason why I actually decided to do this today, is because I actually got an email from one of my clients asking me to validate a document. I asked him to send me all the details. He sent me the email he received, and he also sent me the contract that they offered him. And I started to laugh because in the contract it stated that you would get four thousand pounds a month, an obviously guys, if it’s too good to be true, it’s not. You’re not going to get offered four thousand pounds a month. But in saying that they ask you to get a visa and to pay for these little things.
So in there, they asked for three hundred pounds to get the visa. Then they asked for another hundred and something pounds to do this, and so overall it came to like six hundred. So in order for him to get this job that he will get four thousand pounds, he had to spend six hundred to get all this approved paperwork and visas, which is all a lie. So what they would normally do is, you would get these emails that look like proper emails, from proper companies, but they’re not. They’ve been forged in the system, and you can make any email these days and make it say anything. So there are ways to validate or taking away these temptations of getting involved in this. So the first thing you can do is when you get the contract, study the contract. Look at it carefully. Well look, obviously, first of all, you can send it to us if you like, because we do it. And you just go to www.crewlifeatsea.com, go to our services tab and go down to validation, and there you can just upload the file, it goes to our validation department, they check it out, and they’ll send it back to you in within fifteen minutes to six hours depending on the contract or how much research is needed to be done.
Ok, now back to you can do yourself kind of the point. So what you got to do is look at the contract and look at the company logo. Most of the time it will be pixilated when it’s fake, pixilated means it’s been stretched, they’ve downloaded the picture somewhere, they’ve stretched it and enlarged it. Most of the time the image is not clear, it’s got marks in it, it’s blurry, you can see it’s damaged. It’s not a clear contrasted image, and another thing you can look at it is if they’ve put it on multiple times, because the guy who sent me his one today, it was three times that they put that logo on three locations, the top, the middle and the bottom. You know that’s overdoing it. On an original contract, you only get one. And it’s a really classy one.
Nowadays they’re putting these certified stamps, when you move the page it glows and shines at a different angle and some text appears. These certified stamps that these big companies like Royal Caribbean do and a few others. So that’s the first thing to do. Then look at all the details. So what they do is, they go online and they research and they get the company name and the company details, and they put it on their website and they put on some guy’s name who’s a CEO on there, and they make it as if they’re that person.
So what you can do is go on their website and check if they have that ship. You can research and have a look at what port it’s in for example. Maybe it’s going to be in Barcelona on the 20th of March, and this guy’s offered you a contract on the 20th of March, just, for example, it says it’s in Alaska. And this is not true because the ship’s not even there and you verified it so that’s one way you can do it. Another way you can do it is email the actual company’s and ask them to please check. This is a little difficult because they always have many things on their plate.
That’s why we offer the service because we know exactly where to go and how to approach this. So once you’ve done that, if you print the page out, and look carefully you can see each word has a lot of pixels around it or the job position that you’re looking for, let’s say you’re a security officer, and the job position for security officer, that text is clear, amazingly you can read it perfectly, it’s contrasted well, you can see it’s been typed out from a computer. But the rest of the contract is blurry and pixilated. That’s because it’s fake, he’s copied it, and all he did was delete the name out and put his job title for you, so he could get you to believe it’s for you. There are many other things involved, little things that you can also look at, but we don’t have to go into that in depth.
If you really want you can just send it to us, we’re more than willing to help. We’ll give you a stamp if it’s a scam or if it’s real. Then if you want we can give you a detailed list of what we did, so that you would know, so that next time if you want to do it yourself, or just send it back to us, not a problem. Another topic, payments. Don’t ever pay anybody to ever do anything when it comes to the cruise ships. Everything is free. The only people that charge, are sometimes agents, that you’ve gone into the office, you’ve been there, you’ve seen the ship logo, then you know they’re legit. They’ve given you proper documents, you’ve done proper interviews. They may ask you for a little bit of a fee for services, but normally they get paid when you get hired, but they do sometimes ask. But besides that, nobody else can take money from you, it’s fake, it’s a scam. Anybody who wants money from you is trying to snake you 100%. So take that into account.
So back to the process of how it works. You have to have interviews, there’s no such thing as getting a job without having an interview. I don’t know how or who believes that. It’s like me saying let’s get married and I don’t even know you to some girl. You’ve got to know the people, they’ve got to see how you are, how you react to questions, how you handle the situations in the ship. Are you really good at what your job is or are you just saying that to get the job you know? They need to question you they need to know exactly who they’re hiring. They’re going to be spending a lot of money on you. They’re going to be taking you, depending on your job, they’re going to be paying for your air ticket, they’re going to pay you back for your medical depending on the company. They’re going to spend a lot of money on you. And so they need to check who their clients are. So it’s not just a walk in the park, here’s your contract, you got it, boom.
So it happened to me, I’ll tell you of an example. I was offered a job with the wind star cruises, but I had a feeling, and I was excited because the money was so high and it just seemed really good. But at the time I didn’t notice the contract logo thing. I was still new to this. So what I did was, I applied. The guy came back, looked like it was very professional, the bottom part of the email looked professional, even the email said wind star dot. Everything looked real and legit. Then he said you need to get an Australian visa. What they do is the actually go to the Australian embassy online where you can download the forms, and they just tell you to fill it out and send it back to them. But when they ask you to send it back, they’ve made another email which is fake which says Australia embassy.go.au whatever, and you really think it’s the Australian embassy.
So I was like wow, this could be really legit. So I filled it out, sent it to them, sent all my details, visa, my passport copy. They had everything of mine. And then I get it back, an email saying ok now you need to pay this amount and this amount at, and I knew straight away it’s fake. So do you understand what I’m getting at, they try to suck you in, they get you to like 80% and then say now you have to pay.
Then the people who don’t know about this or the first timers, you guys are going to pay because you really think it’s the real deal but it’s not. And the only way you’re going to learn is if you pay and get snaked and realize what you just did. And I don’t want that to happen, because it’s happened to me. I haven’t paid for it ever, because I knew. But I don’t want it to happen to any of you guys out there. So what I suggest is just send it to me, we can do it for you, we’ll check it for, we’ll send it straight back to you within the appropriate time, and you’ll know if it is or isn’t. So I don’t know what else we can talk about this, but make sure, as I said again, I’ll make sure, never pay for any application to go on a cruise ship or to work on a cruise ship ever. It’s a scam.
Only some agents will ask for some sort of a fee for their services depending on your country and depending on their circumstances. You can always apply online at the actual agent, which you can come to crew life at sea, which we have a list of all the agents. You can go there and apply to all the ones you need. We also have a list of all the recruiting agents in your country. So they’re the ones who will call you or email you and tell you to come into their office and will interview you and tell you what they want. They will do their whole thing.
And also another thing, a good way to get a cruise ship job is when they do cruise fare events. So what that is, they will get hold of all the agents in that country, let’s say, South Africa. And they’ll say listen we’re coming there on the 21st of April, we need to recruit this amount. Then they’ll get hold of you, the recruiter and say we’re having an event at this time at this place. Please, can you be there, and like 10 to 100 candidates will all attend this meeting. And all day you’ll be there and be interviewed and sit there, it’s a long day. And after that, you know for sure if you’ve got a job or not. But these things don’t happen often but they happen continuously so you’ve got to have a look out for that.
If you apply to my mailing list, we know, we send out emails telling you guys which countries are going to have it and everything. Crew life at sea is a very informative way for you guys to everything and anything you need to know about cruise ships, when it comes to jobs, when it comes to scams, when it comes to new ships, when it comes to what’s available and what’s not available, anything you really need help with. So join us and be a part of us. We’ve amazing services out there to assist you guys with anything you need.
We’re one of a kind, we have also a lot of podcasts, which is also there to help you. You can check that on the page. We interview a lot of job titles like casino dealer, hotel director. And you can hear and ask them all the questions about their job. So you can better understand what’s going to happen when you get on a ship. Some things you never know, unless you hear somebodies podcast. Because when you get a job at sea they don’t tell you quite a lot of things until you get on the ship and you have to get put in the deep end and try to swim and save yourself from a lot of crazy stuff. So I hope this podcast about scams helped you a little bit. If you have any questions or queries just send an email to [email protected], we will reply to you as soon as we can, and we want to thank you for your undivided support, and welcome aboard crew life at sea see you all later guys, ciao.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Crew life at sea podcast. Want any of your questions answered? Send us an email [email protected]. Thank you for being a part of our adventure at sea.