SCAMMED

Hi ,
My name is Norma and in 2011 my husband and I decided that we wanted to live and work abroad in the UK. I was advised to post our cv's on the internet which I duly did.The very next day I received an email from a leading Construction Company in the UK and they advised us that they were very interested in my husband's cv as he is a qualified Contracts Manager and as well as a Project Manager.
They told me that he was just the person they were looking for. They offered to send us an application form for him to fill in and I told them to go ahead.Imagine how excited I was and when hubby came home from work , I told him all about it, he was a bit more cautious than me , but we waited for the form to come and I persuaded him to fill it in and we scanned it and sent it back. He then received a call a few days later from the Human Resources manager in Dublin who spoke to him at length and after much to'ing and fro'ing my husband agreed that they send him an application form for a work permit.
We filled it in and once again sent it back. After a week they sent him a contract in the post from Dublin for him to go through, it explained about salary, airfares, accomodation for the first 6 months, it would be a two year contract, subject to extending if both parties were happy with the arrangements.My husband asked if they would pay for me to come over and they told him that I was responsible for half my airfare and they would pay the other half.
After much deliberation I went and applied for my British Passport and his work permit was being seen to at the Irish Consulate and as he had signed the contract and sent it back we decided to go ahead with this and started selling all our possesions as we could not afford to pay for it to go over.
We even received a text from KLM advising us that our tickets had been booked and we were booked for about a month later.Two weeks later we went to the airport here where the Courier service was and picked up my passport, we then decided to go over to the airport and see if our etickets could be picked up. They showed us our bookings on the computer but advised us that theey had not been paid for yet and that they had until the Saturday to pay or it would be cancelled, this was on the Wednesday. We went straight home and I emailed them and asked them what was happening and was informed that the tickets had just been paid and we could pick it up on the day we fly out.
We were advised by them that we need to go to Sars and get a tax cleareance which we did, we went to our bank and asked them what we need to do to get our money out of the country and they set the first "red flag" in motion, they told us to go and check that this company was legit, because people had been scammed for less.
I went home and googled them and everything was legit, we compared phone numbers etc on their letterheads and it was the same as the papers we received.My niece is in England and I asked her to check ,which she did and all legit.
My hubby had to apply for a visitors visa just so that we could get into Britain (another red flag) and once he received it I went back to the bank and asked them about moving our money and they were not keen on helping us, the bank manager told us it's a scam but we did not listen , so I contacted the guy over there and asked him if there was anyway we could get our money out and he offered to send me money orders in dollars for the amount and once we received it we would send him the money over via Western Union, I know that was a very big red flag but we were just so excited to be able to live our dream and so we did exactly that.So we sold everything , had a hundred farewell parties, sent them all our money except for the R20,000.00 we had on us and headed out to the aiport on the day of our flight.
When we got there we found that our tickets had not been paid and we had to make the decision to go back to nothing or go to England , arrive at the company and sort it out, we were convinced it was a misunderstanding, after all the guy would be waiting for us at Heathrow , with my husbands work permit...so we bought tickets for the next available flight which was later that night and flew to England, we could not get hold of anybody as we had sold our laptops  etc.Upon arrival the next day, we cleared customs and waited for this person to appear, we had his name so we had him paged and then the fear started to sink in, here we were starnded in another country, I had a one way ticket because I was a British citizen and my husband ahad a return ticket because he had a visitors visa, so we went to find someone with a laptop and asked if we could just check and see if they had emailed us a nd sure enough, they sent me an email, while we were flying and the email read as such " THE TRUTH...THANK YOU FOR YOUR MONEY, WE WILL SPEND IT WISELY, TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SCAMMED!!!"
Immediately we tried to cash in the money orders and they were found to be fraudulent and the Police became involved, luckily for us we had all the transactions, all correspondence etc with us and we were taken to Metro Police and they then started the investigation, my niece fetched us and we stayed with her.
I found a job as we had to get back to South Africa and my husband had to come back as he did not have a permit to work,we applied for one and they refused it so he could not work. After a year I came back to SA  and we have had to start over, by the way, the first red flag was that the company had a gmail address and we NEVER noticed it.
We would still love the opportunity to work over there... it is still our dream, anybody out there that can help us to realise this dream?
I hope this story helps others , be very very thorough in checking up these things, we went to the company and they told us that firstly they would have flown him over to come for the interview, they would have made sure that he had his work permit in order and they would have paid for us to bring our belongings over as well as pay our airfare.Please feel free to contact me if there is anything else you would like to know...Thank you for reading this and God Bless...Norma Moscos