Deceptive marketing scam killed

24.01.2008

Australian academics were upset to discover this week that a Sydney University careers website was unwittingly directing potential job seekers to an online casino portal operating under the guise of an Asian job site, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

The Sydney University Career Centre's website, careers.usyd.edu.au, is designed to assist students and staff in looking for jobs, and includes a page that provides links to "overseas online job databases". One such link - to http://www.asiajobsearch.org - proved on closer inspection to be an Italian-language online gambling information site featuring mainly Playtech-powered Internet gambling venues called Giochi Online, which is in turn apparently owned by IASP.org and ATMI.org.

When contacted about the misdirection, a spokesman for Sydney University said the link would be removed immediately. "The url for that organisation has obviously changed since the university checked the link last year," he said. "The University of Sydney will also be notifying the National Association of Graduate Careers Centres to ensure that others are not misled," the spokesman added.