Would You Send Revealing Pictures of Yourself for a Shot at a RM700/day Job?

…well, apparently some girls would, in a heartbeat!  Extremely gullible girls, I would add.  Girls, aged 20+, would willingly answer an online ad, without further probing and investigation, and send their portfolios to an unknown address, in the hope of cashing in.

How do I know this, you would ask?

Well, let’s just say I stumbled on this when just last weekend, I was surprised to received emails from people claiming to respond to an ad for lingerie models.  One of these emails provided me the source where this ad originated from, and horror of horrors, I discovered that the advertiser had used my company’s logo, name, URL and phone number, soliciting for lingerie models.  The ad purportedly needed lingerie models for a 2-day shoot, where the successful candidates would be paid RM700 upfront and the remainder of RM700 at the end of the shoot.  Applicants were invited to send in their detailed resume, portfolios and photos, “preferably in an undergarment shoot”.  The potential “models” were also “reassured” that the photographer would be a female one, and they could also bring their boyfriend along if they wanted to!

Of course, the advertiser made the mistake of NOT including his/her email, but instead put down my company’s web url, resulting in these gullible girls visiting my site and emailing me via the Contact Us link on my site.  I’d also received a couple of phone calls inquiring about the ad.

I promptly covered my back and put up a notice on my site stating that we were NOT hiring any models, and I also contacted the advertiser to remove the post immediately.  A day later, the post was marked only as EXPIRED, but it still remained on the site.

I then contacted the website owner to remove the offending post, or I would contact the webhost to remove the site.  There was no answer from the website owner despite repeated attempts to contact him/her after a day, so I contacted the webhost to help contact the website owner to remove the post or remove the site within 48 hours, failing which I told them I would begin legal proceedings.

The post was promptly removed within 2 hours.  No word of apology or anything.  It was removed just like that. (there are still other similar ads on that site, but I am not sure if they’re all legitimate)

I am not publishing this post to expose the advertiser, nor the website, nor the webhost (if I’d wanted to do that, I would have posted pictures of the actual ad and website and advertiser).  Rather, I am publishing this because I am appalled at the gullibility of these girls, who, for the sake of money, would readily send pictures of themselves scantily-clad to total strangers.  Now we know how these girls get themselves into trouble.  Now we know how these *advertisers* trick girls into sending photos to them.

Girls (and boys): if you are reading this, PLEASE make sure you do not send your personal private photos to any stranger who puts and modelling ad up on the internet.  Even if it looks reputable, they could well be using the name of another company to gain trust.

And if you just happen to be one of the girls who did indeed send your photos to my email address, well consider yourself lucky this time round that you just dodged a bullet.  In fact, I think I’m just gonna delete all those emails with the photos.  Next time, be extra extra careful.