DENVER — Life in North Dakota wasn’t so bad for John Kinnamon. A job, a home, a family, some savings.

Then, just like that, the 49-year-old facilities manager found himself looking for work, forced to move back to Colorado when the family’s house north of Denver hadn’t sold earlier this year.

And as the unemployed like Kinnamon seek jobs in a tough economy, there are even more opportunities for them to be victimized, experts say.

“When you’re in need of a job, your guard goes down,” Kinnamon said.

Kinnamon tried various leads, posted a resumé on a few online services and hunted through the classified ads.

Out of the blue came a phone call from Careers for Life, an Aurora, Colo., employment agency — clients say CFL representatives told them it’s a career management firm, thus avoiding pertinent Colorado laws.

“They said to come in for an interview, that they could get me a job within two weeks,” Kinnamon said.

The opportunity was supposedly with Bj Services Co. in Rock Springs, Wyo., a high-paying job working in an oil field.

The trip yielded nothing, and company representatives recently said they’ve never hired CFL to recruit for them.

“The long and short of it, I paid $2,500 for them to find me a job and I got nothing,” said Kinnamon, now working at a job he found himself on craigslist.org.

His complaints have met with no response, and company officials could not be reached for comment. Other numbers for company owner Jamee Young were disconnected.

Several complaints similar to Kinnamon’s have been filed with the Denver-Boulder Better Business Bureau, all for oil-field production positions that did not pan out. Most said they paid hundreds of dollars for job help.

Experts say the scams range from work-at-home opportunities to job recruiters with no job at all. All sound convincing; all promise success.

“Career sites that focus on diverse or older workers are particularly targeted for scams,” said Gene Burnard, publisher of Workforce50.com, an award-winning Web site that caters to the experienced work force.

“They are very vulnerable,” Burnard said. “When they see opportunity, they often blindly jump at it.”

Experts counsel that scams are easily spotted if you keep a cool head and your hand on your checkbook and credit card.

“They are either identity thieves or ‘you pay us’ outfits where they set you up to work at home,” Burnard said.

Resumé-filled Web sites such as Monster.com often are targets for identity thieves intent on grabbing what little information they can, posing as businesses with a job, and working from your resumé details.

While it’s difficult to stop, Monster.com folks say they have a variety of safety nets — scanning for too much traffic and legitimacy screening among them — to minimize the exposure. More important, though, is that posters leave all personal information off their resumés until they get a bona fide interview.

Unsolicited calls from recruiters are another flag, according to Paul Riddell, a victim of several employment scams who has turned the experience into an advocacy vocation.

“Due to the current economic conditions, we’re seeing an increase in the recruiters who have a ‘sure-fire’ position but require an application fee,” said Riddell, who runs the Texas Triffid Ranch, a small horticulture business in Dallas.

“Once the check for ‘career counseling’ clears, the recruiter’s phone number is amazingly disconnected or it always goes into voice mail,” he said. “What you get is a job search system that’s worse than if you simply used the local classified ads.”

Many victims say they were out of work for an extended period when they fell prey to an employment scam, dropping their guard long enough to spend money they could ill afford.

Experts say it’s best to do a background check on an agency before paying any money, and if a job is promised — illegal in many states, including Colorado — you cannot be charged a fee before you’re hired. With more than 30,000 employment agencies in the United States, there are plenty to choose from.

“Does the agency charge the employer or the candidate?” said John Sacerdote, vice president of the National Association of Personnel Services.

“There are legitimate firms that charge the candidate, but only after they’ve found them a job. I would tend to stay clear of anyone who asks for money up front.”