This Swedish Jobs Web Site Is a Bit tvivelaktig (questionable)

This is not Simon Nordin

Note: there is a company in Australia named Swede Recruit. This post is not about that company. If you really want to get a job in Sweden, I explain the process here.

There are many people desperate to find work in other countries. There are, sadly, many others who are all too happy to take advantage of this. You'll find plenty of "we'll get you an overseas job" sites with dodgy credentials and it looks like there might be a new one in Sweden, apparently run by one "Simon Nordin, CEO".

It seems "Ecothegeek" on Reddit had his CV on Eures, the European job portal, and a company contacted him saying that they'd like to find him a job in Sweden for the low price of €195. Ecothegeek was a bit concerned and asked about them on Reddit's /r/IWantOut community. Something didn't seem quite right to me, so I started digging.

Called swederecruit dot com (not linking to avoid giving them traffic) and claiming on their Web site to have been doing business since 1998, they registered their domain a few days ago and launched their grammatically-challenged Web site (my favorite is the "Get a Work" link). It's possible that they're simply a brand-new company hoping to make themselves look mature, or maybe they're established international recruiters who inexplicably forgot to get a Web site for 15 years.

From their About Us page (emphasis mine):

Swede Recruit founded in 1998 and since then has given people and businesses to develop by being a caring, responsive and solution-oriented agencies.

We offer solutions for staffing, recruitment and outplacement. Our clients are among both private and public companies and organizations.

We at Swede Recruit make it as smooth as possible for our graduates to find jobs that suit them perfectly and as easy as possible for a recruiting firm to find the right employees . We believe that everyone is the right person in the right place, anywhere in the world. It’s just about finding the right. Here we come in and help.

We have put a focus on being a helping hand to job seekers from other countries who are looking for work in Sweden. We provide a large number of apartments for our job seekers to make it easier to make the move to Sweden.

Swede Recruit connects right manpower for the job!

And here's their Apply page (emphasis mine):

Below you can apply for a job, an apartment and a work permit in Sweden that guarantees you an optional work and an optional home. When you apply for this you will receive a letter via email on how to complete your payment.

For us to be able to process your application, you need to pay the administrative fee of 195 euros. The process goes through a work permit, an apartment and a job for you.

Within three months, we will introduce alot of job alternatives for you and a nearby apartment. After you have decided which job and which apartment you want as we have suggested to you, you will get your work permit in Sweden. Then you are welcome to your new job and your new apartment.

If it turns out that you are not satisfied with the jobs and / or the apartment that we present to you within three months, we can at your request, keep searching or refund the full payment to you.

For your and our success, we provide only the work that is under swedish and union standard salaries. Swedish average salary is 29,000 SEK (about 3,100 euros).

Wow. That's pretty impressive. €195 (~$270 US) and they'll provide you with alot (sic) of job alternatives and an apartment!

So why do I think something is odd? Well, I've been researching expat issues for a long time and my wife and I run an international IT recruiting company, so I think I have some experience here. You generally don't just pay some money and get a work permit. Sweden is still struggling with unemployment, but as it turns out, under a 2008 change in their laws, virtually anyone can get a work permit in Sweden if they can convince a company to offer them a job. So maybe this site is legit?

So I dug into their Web site. First:

• Their domain was registered on October 28th, 2013.
• Alexa has no history for them.
• The Internet Archive has no history for them.

This is not a smoking gun and there could be explanations for why a 15-year company handling international recruitment would not have had a Web presence prior to a few days ago. But let's look further.

According to their Web site (/maria-moved-from-madrid-to-gothenburg/), Maria Gonzalez is a 34 year old Spanish woman who used their services to find work in Gothenburg, Sweden. They have a short interview with her where she explains how easily Swede Recruit found her a job and an apartment. Maria sounds very happy.

Except that the image they used is actually that of Rebecca Martinez, an assistant professor in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri.

Well, OK. Mistakes happen. Or maybe Maria didn't want her photo taken so they made do with what they could borrow from other Web sites. Or maybe they just lost Maria's photo?

And then there's the happy tale of Raila (/raila-got-a-job-and-housing-in-stockholm-via-swed-recruitment/). He struggled for two years to find a job in his native Kenya, but Swede Recruit found him a lovely job as a café assistant in downtown Stockholm.

Apparently they lost Raila's photo too, so Swede Recruit repurposed the photo of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a film director from Chad.

Again, no smoking gun here. Maybe they just keep forgetting to take photos of the people they help.

So are their any real photos of people on their site? Sure! They have a staff page. I took a screenshot in case they accidentally lose these photos too.

Those people are:

• Simon Nordin CEO (A "Simon Nordin" registered the swederecruit dot com domain)
• Kevin Söderman
• Dennis Nyström
• Karin Friman
• Gustav Ek
• Petra Flykt

The real Simon Nordin?

And in the mother of all coincidences, it turns out that Guillaume Cailleux, Chris Carver, Adam Finck, Laura Walker, Zachary Barrows and Liz Allen, people who work for the charity invisiblechildren.com, are all dead ringers for them, right down to the clothes! Weird, eh?

Psssst, Simon: didn't you know how trivial it is to find out if an image on the Web is used on another site?

Oh, and Swede Recruit doesn't appear to be registered as a Swedish company. Scambook already has an entry for them and the company registry number that people claim Swede Recruit is using is false.

It appears that Simon Nordin, the "CEO", or someone using the name "Gustav Ek" (see above), was actively contacting people via Eures, the European Job Mobility portal. In fact, it looks like they may have mass mailed people on that Web site, trying to get people to pay €195. However, Eures is now calling Swede Recruit a fake company and under Swedish law, to qualify for a Swedish work permit, the job must be listed on Eures.

I contacted him under a fake name and said I couldn't apply because I didn't have a "Eures ID" (a "required" field on their "Apply" form). Someone named "Simon Nordin" replied:

Hi,

You need to register at our site and pay the administration fee to take part of our services. 

And if you do not have a eures id you can leave it blank

Best regards
Simon Nordin

Then when I checked the "Apply" page again, someone had removed the field requiring a Eures ID. I filled in my information and was sent a link to a PDF with Mr. Nordin's IBAN, and BIC/SWIFT information for transferring the money to his account. Strange that a 15-year old company would be using the CEO's personal bank details rather than their own (though I have to say, if this entire thing was set up just to make Mr. Nordin look very stupid, someone's done a brilliant job and I should be apologizing to Mr. Nordin).

Further digging turned up Mr. Nordin relatively quickly. He's probably a young man around 18 to 20 years old or so, possibly living with his mother. I found plenty of contact information for him and his family and a friend in Sweden offered to contact the boy's family for me, and he did. The boy's aunt and father have allegedly been contacted and from what I understand, the father said they'd get down to the bottom of this and go to the police, if necessary. I've made several attempts through different channels to contact Mr. Nordin to get his side of the story. Neither Mr. Nordin nor his "company" have responded to me. If you complete the "Apply" form, the Web site is still sending out "order confirmations" asking people to send him money.

I work hard trying to help people legitimately find work in other countries and it saddens me to see something like this. Perhaps Swede Recruit is simply a very unprofessional company that doesn't understand that misrepresenting themselves like this is wrong. I would suggest ignoring them and keep reading this site. I don't charge you a damned thing.

You Can Move to Pitcairn Island

Pitcairn Island Dock
Photo by Jens Bludau

On April 28, 1789, the crew of the HMS Bounty mutinied for reasons that are debated to this day. Some say it was harsh treatment by Captain Bligh; others claim it was debauched sailors attracted to the sexually liberal lifestyle of Polynesia. Whatever the cause, the mutineers split and some settled in Tahiti, while others settled on Pitcairn Island, perhaps the most remote settlement in the world. Today, over two centuries later, the descendants of the original mutineers still live there and they have a problem. With a rapidly declining population, they want you to move there.

Do It Yourself Expats

Nighttime shot of one of the towers of
The vieux port in La Rochelle

Note: click on the photos to enlarge them. They're photos of the town I live in and are unrelated to the post.

In a very interesting blog post, a man describes how moving to Thailand helped him launch a startup. The short version: by living somewhere that allowed him to keep his monthly expenses down to around $1,000 a month, he was able to have more money to build his business and because he didn't know people there, he was less distracted by his social life.

Here's the interesting bit: he didn't have a work permit. He just sold everything he owned and caught a flight. This is what I call a "DIY (Do It Yourself) Expat". We're going to be seeing more and more of them in the future.

Everyone in La Rochelle
knows where this house is.

There's quite a debate about this post on Hacker News, with at least one individual, who claims to be Thai, asserting that a Thai can get by on $500 a month (though not if you choose to live in Bangkok). The trick is one that expats the world over learn: if you live as if you lived in your home country, you can easily pay a small fortune, particularly if the culture is far different from your own. People sometimes are confused by the high rents and low salaries of many cities, such as Hong Kong, but they forget that the locals can survive there, which means there's more going on than one might think.

A street near our flat.

Since the author of that post arrived on a tourist visa, he couldn't legally stay in Thailand forever, so he had to keep doing what is known as a visa run. This is the practice of a leaving a country for a short time merely so that you can return a get your visa renewed. I actually know of a gentleman who stayed in a Paris for a couple of years doing visa runs, but he found it increasingly difficult and it's not terribly common for Western Europe. It's generally emerging economies that are more tolerant of the practice. Visa runs are fairly common in Southeast Asia and South America.

La Rue sur les Murs, La Rochelle

The author already had an online business and that, of course, is the key for making this work. You generally can't just show up in a new country and (legally) work, but there's nothing stopping a tourist from attending their existing business. So you need an online job. Editor? Software developer? Photographer. There are many ways to become location-independent. You just need to make it happen.

Rue du Minage, La Rochelle

Oh, and you either want to put most of the things you own in storage, leave them with family or friends, or better yet, learn to live with just 100 things. That way you'll still be able to carry what you need to survive if you're denied re-entry on a visa run. And you'll want to be able to say "yes" to Count von Europe.

The local market setting up in the morning

The world is getting smaller. Opportunities are opening up everywhere, but rather than wait for that opportunity, why not create it? With the increase in telecommuting and the strength of many emerging economies, I fully expect a long-term downward pressure on wages in OECD nations. More and more companies are discovering that they can hire several remote workers for the cost of a single local worker. Not all positions are amenable to this, but this situation isn't going to go away and nows the time to plan for it.

Doing Business in La Rochelle, France

Afternoon on the Bay of Biscay

Click on the photos to see larger versions.

Life has really taken a strange and interesting turn. If you travel enough and leave yourself open to adventure, sooner or later things will happen. "Luck" usually involves hard work and perseverance, not just stumbling into good fortune.

Case in point, last Friday my wife and I were sitting in a boat, watching the last Olympic sailing trials in La Rochelle. We were surrounded by local business leaders, all of this paid for courtesy of La Rochelle and the local area governments.

It's a great time to be an expat

Get out there and explore the damned world already!
Photo by Hartwig HKD

Note: Today's post is more of a philosophical ramble of ideas that have been crossing my mind. It probably won't do a damn thing to help you become an expat.

Despite my writing about the doom and gloom that is the impact of the poorly thought out FATCA law, it's a fascinating time to be an expat, particularly one from the US. While times might seem hard right now, adventures are things that we often don't appreciate while they're happening, but create great stories to share after the pain has faded. And the world is going through a grand adventure right now and I fully believe that whatever emerges isn't going to be what was. The reason for this is simple: the world is finally reacting to a uni-polar world. The following will seem like a strange ramble, unrelated to expats, but bear with me.

In international politics, there is a theory that a bi-polar world, a world with two superpowers balancing each other, is more stable than a multi- or uni-polar world. In a multi-polar world, you have a world with many great powers vying for supremacy, such as the world in the century prior to WWII. Alliances, broken promises, and a constant jousting for position allegedly lead to a fragile, conflict-ridden state of international politics, while a bi-polar world is one where each superpower has states who follow it and the gulf is so wide that states generally do not cross from one side to the other. Thus, the bi-polar world is viewed as stable.

Well today, we live in the uni-polar world of American hegemony. There is simply no competition. China quietly advances, deliberately limiting their presence on the world stage. The EU has no common foreign policy and their lack of fiscal union has led to the instability of the Euro (and the Eurozone). Russia has tried repeatedly to put themselves back on the world stage, but it's clear they are not the superpower that the USSR was. There was even strange talk about the rise of Brazil, but current Brazilian woes have put an end to that. India? Not likely. Though they're growing fast, they have enough local problems that asserting themselves on the world stage isn't likely any time soon.

So the US stands as the lone world superpower. In fact, some argue that because there is no serious contender as an alternate superpower, US dominion will continue, but they've overlooked the one nation that has the might to threaten the standing of the US: the US itself. With no significant check on US power, the US is looking inward and not doing a great job working with the rest of the world.

In this 2003 interview with Kenneth Waltz, a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkely, when asked about the danger of a unipolar world, said (emphasis mine):

The greatest danger was described very well by a French cleric, who died in 1713, who was also a counselor to rulers, who said: I have never known a country disposing of overwhelming power to behave with forbearance and moderation for more than a very short period of time. And we've seen this over and over again. It illustrates nicely how states fail to learn from history, from other countries' experiences. Time and time again, countries that dispose of overwhelming power, as we now do, have abused their power. The key characteristic of a unipolar world is that there are no checks and balances against that power, so it's free to follow its fancy, it's free to act on its whims. Since there are very minor, very weak external constraints, everything depends on the internal politics of the country in question.

Now look at where we've come. By the late 1990s, the US had balanced their budget, was paying down the debt, was widely respected, if not liked, and while the seeds of political contention were strong (who can forget the waste of time that was the Whitewater debacle?), things were generally going well. And then 9/11 happened.

The "coalition of the willing"
prior to the last Iraq war.

Though the world was behind the US invasion of Afghanistan, by the time the US was beating the drums of war for Iraq, the coalition of the willing was an embarrassing hodgepodge of countries with many US allies missing from said list.

Fast forward to 2013.

• In a virtually unprecedented move, the UK refused to support US military action against another country.
• Vladimir Putin, the de fact ruler of Russia, has managed to block US military action against Syria.
• China is telling the US to get their act together.
• Brazil has snubbed the US over spying scandals.
• Venezuela is (again) expelling US diplomats.
• Ecuador expelled the US ambassador.
• Bolivia is threatening to sue the US government.

The US is struggling to maintain influence in South America, the threat of a US military assault is becoming less likely and the real threat of a US default on its debt is becoming increasingly likely.

So what does this mean for expats? On a day to day basis, it really doesn't mean much. However, over the long term, I think this is an incredibly fascinating time to explore the world. We don't know what's going to happen, but many agree that the uni-polar model of American hegemony can't last. I don't know if it will end from the US loss of influence of the rise of the influence of rivals (or a combination), but the world is changing radically right now. History is going to look back at this time as a phase change in the world political structure that started with 9/11, though the seeds were planted long before that.

More and more Americans are leaving the US. More scientists are contemplating leaving the US (and believe me, other countries will happily snap them up). The burgeoning cloud computing industry in the US is facing billions of dollars in losses over the PRISM scandal and these repercussions are being felt throughout the IT industry. Most new US jobs in the "recovery" are part-time jobs, helping to obscure the high unemployment rates. The US manufacturing base is shrinking. And while everyone was paying attention to the Detroit bankruptcy, they were ignoring the fact that cities and municipalities across the US are declaring bankruptcy. Though my fellow Americans may hate me for calling a spade a spade, I cannot help but think that this is just the beginning.

So get off your butt. Get your TEFL certification. Prep your CV. Read about the European Blue Card. The world is changing and you can either sit at home and read about it, or get on a plane and experience it.

Countries You Can (cheaply) Buy Your Way Into

Retire in Bangkok!
Photo by Mike Behnken

A few days ago I posted about countries that will let you live there if you show a modest income from abroad. I got curious and asked Reddit's /r/IWantOut community for more information. While many of the suggestions were unsourced, some provided references and they're awesome. Got $20,000 US? Are you 35 years old or older? Retire in the Phillipines via the SRRV program.  Hell, my wife and I could cash out our brand-new business and probably survive quite nicely in the Phillipines. (My wife would kill me for suggesting this, though).

Or maybe Thailand tickles your fancy. You can retired there on a roughly $1,500 a month income, though a large enough deposit in a bank around will get around this. Thai salaries appear to range around 300 to 800 a month, on average, so you could definitely survive on this, but everything I read suggests you'll need a minimum of $1,000 a month or more to get by.

Is Ecuador more interesting? They have a variety of visas, including a pensioner's visa requiring a minimum income of $800 a month.

Malaysia's My Second Home program was also mentioned. I've written about it before. If you have around $150,000 in the bank and can show roughly a $3,000 a month income, you can move there.

The jungle in Ometepe, Nicaragua
Photo by Thomas Frost Jensen

A mere $600 a month will let you retire in Nicaragua. The minimum retirement age is 45, but Nicaragua will waive that requirement if you can show a stable income. And assuming that income is from outside of Nicaragua, it's also tax free.

I also tried to find decent information about African countries, but as usual, it eludes me (other than a $1 million investment visa for South Africa). Still, for those looking for adventure and can figure out a remote income, you have many, many options. Obviously, some will be more "adventurous" than others, such as in Thailand, a beautiful country that can't quite shake the coup rumors, but if you're willing to accept a little risk, there's a lot of reward, too. I've a great life here in France that I wouldn't trade for anything, but were I single and not a father, I think I'd become a nomad and start exploring these places. It's a big world out there.