Company reperesentative. not sure if its legal?

Ive been offered a job as a company representative. without going through an interview or anything. all he wanted were my details and said i got the job. im not sure its kinda dodgy this is the email he replied with:

khayyam ahmed ,
Hello Ahmed,thanks for the mail and prompt response,you are hereby offered the job as our company representative in uk,and on behalf of the company board,i congratulate you for the offer,and we shall forward your details to our customer/client that are ready to start making payment to us,and we will get back to you with the exact date the cheque will get to you...

Best regards,
James Cole
Agricultural Research Institute of Northern Ireland
www.arini.ac.uk
Hillsborough,
Ireland BT26 6DR

Do you ever apply for a job there in the first place? ( other wise it could be a scam)

The first thing i would do is look in your local phone book that the Research Institute exists or call dir enq and get a number i would never use the phone numbers/ websites in any of these e-mail.

Legally speaking they can't give you can't have a full permanent job without going though "Fair and open competition" (interview with at least 2 ppl present on the interview panel) even if on a temp basis they usually interview also.

I googled the the Research Institute http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=a... but my gut feeling is it still leaning towards it being a scam to obtain personal information such as your national insurance number or its help them spend stolen money etc

i hope that helps you out

Sounds like a scam. The website doesn't exist. At least I could not get it to come up. Did you check them out in any other way? Some of these companies will tell you that you have to submit money to them and then they will pay you.
You didn't provide a lot of details, but my guess is you have to send some money for something. They promise to reimburse you or you will make a lot of money. You get nothing from them except maybe another request for money.

A recent scam had people cashing checks from a company, depositing the money, and sending a portion back to the person/company. The checks were real, but stolen. So they laundered the money through the unsuspecting who ended up having to pay the money back.

If it sounds to good to be true, then almost every time it is.

Good luck
Scam. Thy did not even bother to type it nicely.