THE Canadian High Commission and the labour ministry are warning Jamaicans looking for jobs overseas to be wary of a phony company that is promising lucrative jobs on offshore oil projects, luring its victims with salaries of up to J$23,000 per day.

Officials did not say how many Jamaicans have already been fleeced, or by how much. But with some locals having been fooled into sending off the more than $11,000 processing fee, the sums involved appear substantial.

According to the High Commission it has, since January, received several complaints and enquiries about Caledonian Offshore Ltd.

The calls started coming to the Kingston embassy in January, explained the embassy’s commercial counsellor, Robert Farrell, after Caledonian Offshore Ltd placed an advertisement in a local newspaper. While most callers only had questions, some had already sent off the $11,285 (US$185) processing fee and received no response from the company.

“In the past few days, enquiries have begun again, suggesting that Caledonian Offshore is once again targeting Jamaica,” Farrell said. “We have had enquiries and a few complaints.”

Last week, the Ministry of Labour said that it had also received complaints about Caledonia Offshore.

“Persons have complained that they have been approached here by persons who claim they are representatives of that company,” explained Barrington Bailey, the labour ministry’s senior director of manpower services.

When the calls came in, he said, the ministry’s Toronto office could not identify the company as a legitimate agency.

“In my opinion it is an illegal agency,” he told the Observer, and repeated the ministry’s call for persons not to do business with unregistered recruiting agencies.

“Any company that is recruiting Jamaican workers should come through the Ministry of Labour,” Bailey said. “We don’t use third parties and there’s absolutely no fee associated with our programmes.”

Farrell, meanwhile, described the activities carried out by Caledonia Offshore as “international fraud” that may have affected persons as far as Peru, Lagos, Belgrade, Bangkok and Yugoslavia. The company first came to the Canadians’ attention in those countries four years ago.

“It’s an international criminal activity, a fraud, and we want to make sure that when (local newspapers) get the ad they won’t place it,” Farrell said.

“It’s a long-standing problem we have,” the embassy official said. “It seems that they wait a while, place an ad and when everything quiets down again they come back with another ad six months or a year later.”

On its website – www.caledonianoffshore.com – Caledonia Offshore posts several vacancies from oil drillers, engineers, rig mechanics and technicians, to plumbers, welders, demolition and safety crews, kitchen staff, storekeepers and laundry stewards.

It promises that oil drillers would earn US$380 per day, while roustabouts could earn US$275. Service personnel, which it lists as administrative and hotel staff room stewards, electricians and repairman are in line to earn US$250 per day.

The scam targets persons between the ages 20 and 50 who are in “excellent health”.

Other benefits, the website promised, include free training and accommodation, paid flights and tax-free salaries.

But the company, Farrell said, is a scam asking victims to enclose application fees of nearly US$200 for a chance to earn big bucks.

The company only lists a fax number and e-mail address, saying it cannot accept phone calls “due to the high volume of applications”. Canadian authorities had in the past traced calls to phone numbers listed on the site to Panama, and once to Sierra Leone, Farrell said.

“They move from place to place to place and if they were in Canada, we would have shut them down because they are a fraudulent company,” he added.