Scam alert: Somya Translators June 16, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Scam alert.trackback
If you receive an e-mail with a signature for Ajoy Singh at Somya Translators (e-mail: somyatranslation@yahoo.com, phone: +91-11-22484180, cell : + 91-9990094796, fax : +91-11-22484180) with a job request, do not fall for it. It is apparently a scam. According to Tina Mittra, a project manager of Somya Translators Pvt. Ltd. in Delhi, India, the company has been receiving invoices and e-mail for work which the company had not assigned. Apparently someone is using the e-mail somyatranslation@yahoo.com and assigning work under Somya Translators’ name and company details. If you receive a job request from the yahoo.com account, do not accept it. As Tina states, “We only use our internal company accounts like sales@somyatrans.com etc. for all the business activities. We never use yahoo, gmail, rediff or any other public accounts for business activities. We welcome suggestions from all of you how we can catch this kind of people.”
Several people on the ProZ.com forums and some of the payment practices lists I subscribe to have been complaining about Somya Translators for a while now. This explains a lot. All we can do on our end is ignore the job request. Hopefully they are able to take legal action on their end.
For more information, please read the ProZ.com forum thread. This only underscores my insistence that no one ever do business with a yahoo.com account!
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Actually, those practices seem to go on. Recently I found a job posting on translatorscafe. The job posting was official and mentioned an official mailbox. See http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/SelectedJob.asp?Job=59085&Jobs=59087%2059086%2059085%2059075%2059074%2059067%2059057%2059054%2059052
Since the rate is ridiculous, I answered with a short information about professional translation rates per word.
I used the direct contact button on the platform – and got an answer from tele_solutions12@yahoo.com.
Since I do not believe that the agency would ignore a false account under their name, the forwarder must have been officially typed in in their portfolio.
As an agency you can pretend not to know about yahoo mailboxes and not to know “who these people are”, but definitely you can try to catch some newbies with these practices.
Never accept offers from a yahoo mailbox and forward the yahoo answer to the official mailbox, ask them for their statement. How did the person with the yahoo mailbox get an answer email, if it was sent to the official agency via translatorscafe? I am sure an agency can earn some additional money regularly on newbies falling for this.