Beware - generally

ADVICE. There are various bits of advice on these boards and on the site. Nobody should swallow any of it whole - including mine. The most important protection any of us have here is our own common sense. Its very important to realize and remember the bad guys can post too and its very much to their nasty benefit to post, and give/encourage support for, bad advice.

TIME - INVESTMENT AND COMMUNICATION. Job, and employee, seeking takes time, effort and information, especially when (as here) the potential job has so many open variables. Yes, back and forth emails take time and effort. For legitimate guys, that’s an investment which can payoff with a good result and/or by avoiding bad results. For bad guys, that time and effort tends to raise their investment beyond the value they can recover with their scam. Thus, one way to weed out the not (and barely) serious, and the bad guys, is to have significant back and forth communication and, the more you have, the more info you’ll have. That’s more to cross check and consider and its more to verify later (maybe in person) and less to be surprised by later.

TIME - PRESSURE. One of any bad guy’s tools is time pressure, so don’t fall for it. If a guy really is homeless, or being beaten, etc., every local community has temporary solutions. Even if a legitimate guy has other prospects and is about to make a decision, he has incentives to make the best choice among his alternatives, including you.

CREDIBILITY THROUGH POSTS. Even if all the above seems wise and honest (or whatever), it doesn’t prove I am those things; and it’s the same for everybody else. Test it with communication - is the guy consistently wise and honest (or whatever) in multiple emails, or does he display as much (or more) bad than good? A bad guy might very well be the loudest voice here, denouncing bad guys, giving advice which assists his own dirty schemes and hoping/expecting others to believe he’s good because he’s SO “against” bad.

Good luck to the good guys and bad luck to the bad guys!