Work-From-Home Job Scams | Employment Fraud Red Flags

On Scams, Hacks and Frauds this week, we take you deep into a real employment scam.  What promised to be a dream work-from-home job turned out not just a nightmare but a full-on scam, with money laundering on top.   If you're looking for work or thinking about changing jobs, make sure you listen for red flags.

And to help us find those fraud red flags, we're going to speak to Steven Rothberg from College Recruiter.  Steven helps people find their first jobs and is an expert on navigating the employment market, so he knows a lot about employment fraud.  He'll help you understand what a real job offer looks like and what is sure to be a scam.

We publish new content every other Monday. The  10 minutes our episodes may save your wallet, and help protect your family.

If you like shows like "The Perfect Scam" or "Darknet Diaries" then this show might be for you.  

On our website you’ll find more computer hacking, identity fraud, impersonation, consumer rights and Romance Scams.  To find these and to access our transcripts, visit us at www.scamshacksandfrauds.com.

The transcript and spoken audio are available under the Creative Commons, Share Alike, With Attributions license. For more information on this visit creativecommons.org.  

Transcript

 Imagine this, you are stuck in a toxic job eight hours a day, desperate to get out. After eight months of searching, you get a call that sounds like this:

I need to discuss a job with you. Please add me on WhatsApp. 

So you add them on WhatsApp and send them a message. Not long after, you are offered not just a job, but a dream job. You can work from home whenever you like. Whenever you feel like it.

Since it sounds too good to be true, you Google the company, and it checks out, so you sign up. Well, that's what happened to one listener, and they found themselves caught deep in an incredibly sophisticated job scam, and we'll tell you all about it here on the podcast. That helps keep you safe from scams, hacks, and frauds.  

Before we begin, could you please take out your phone and share this episode with someone you know who's looking for work, so they know exactly what to look for?

Our anonymous listener was introduced to this scam by a recruiter on WhatsApp, claiming to be from a recruitment firm operating on behalf of a marketing firm, although they gave real company names.  We're not going to mention them here because, as best as we can tell, they're an innocent victim too. But these were firms of significant size that, if you Google, you'll find websites and an international presence for them.

So here's how the job was pitched to our listener.

The job is completely flexible and can be performed remotely. Our company operates daily from 11:00 AM to 11:00 PM, allowing you to work just one to two hours per day at a time that fits your schedule. All you need is a smartphone or a computer to start working.

The salary was also very impressive.  Depending on how many days you choose to work, you could earn 4,716 pounds per month plus commission, and the training is all online.

For someone desperate to escape a bad situation, it seemed like a true godsend; the company had checked out, so there was no reason to be sceptical.

But our listener still did his homework and asked for things like a job description. He was told the job would be to improve app rankings, reviews, and visibility on the Play Store and the App Store, optimising apps, which didn't require anything to be downloaded to your phone or computer.

They called the job a data transporter, and if it doesn't work out, that's fine.  The job has a seven-day trial where you can walk away at the end with one week's worth of pay.  That's 618 pounds if you're interested. There's no time to waste. The recruiter can take you through the training right now on WhatsApp. They'll get you signed up on the website and you're on their platform.

The facade of having to rate apps and optimize data is soon forgotten. You're instructed to buy some crypto.  In this case, it was USDC, A specific type of cryptocurrency linked to the value of the US dollar. You're told to send that to a certain wallet address, and then you are sent back funds to cover the purchase in your commission.  0.5%. It seems like money for nothing, but this isn't the end of the operation.

Let's talk special orders. That's how you make the big money.

Randomly or so, they claim you'll be allocated a special order.  These cannot be cancelled or skipped.  They must be completed.  However, the commission is 10 times the standard commission, but unlike a standard order, you're not refunded straight away or sent your commission instantly.

But don't worry, you can still do some regular jobs in the meantime to rebuild your balance, although you might have to top up your balance with more crypto to be able to do those.

——

Okay. Let's take a big look at what's happening here.

Firstly, if this weren't a scam, you would be likely acting as part of a criminal enterprise. When you are buying crypto for someone else, particularly people you don't know, who then swap it for crypto that they own, that's probably money laundering.

Money laundering, as we discussed in our last episode, is where you try to disguise where dirty money is coming from. Dirty, meaning it's coming from a criminal enterprise.

This is highly illegal and even if you don't know you're doing it or a part of it, you can still be arrested and convicted.

We previously covered the story of Ebony King, who found the police at her door when a friend overpaid her for money that they had borrowed and asked her to pay the difference back in cash. 

But what makes this a scam rather than just a regular criminal enterprise is those special orders.  The small orders are there to just convince you that it's legitimate.  Well, as legitimate as something like this can be, and that you can make real money when they think you're convinced they drop the special order on you.  And since you're convinced. You give them more money convinced you're gonna get it back…

…But you never will.

They'll keep trying to squeeze you for more special orders until you either run out of money or give up. 

——

So since these fake jobs are everywhere, I thought I'd better talk to an expert.  

I'm joined by Steve Rothberg from College Recruiter. Thanks for joining me. 

Cee, it's great to be with you. Thank you. 

It feels like job hunting has changed a lot in recent years. How will real recruiters try to reach out and make contact? 

Yeah, you know, Some of some recruiters, whether they work for the employer or whether they work for what we in the US will call a staffing agency, Usually in the UK you just refer to 'em as an agency, but it's a third party that contracts with them. If they're reaching out to candidates, then they will typically do so via Platforms like LinkedIn, indeed, job boards, and job search sites. 

Occasionally, you'll find them where they, if you have very highly specialised skills, think professor, a dentist, something like that, they may find you on the list of a conference or maybe a webinar that you delivered, and then they'll reach out to you that way; sometimes they'll do it by phone, it's mostly email.

Most people though, when they're finding jobs, it's the candidate, it's the job seeker that's actually contacting the recruiter. It's not the recruiter contacting the job seeker. 

So the other day I got a phone call from someone saying, please help me on WhatsApp. I've got a job to discuss. Is that gonna be real or is that gonna be fake?

I guess I wanted to know whether you were accepting the job offer that, that I was extending to you and for all of your banking information. And so far I have not received that and I'm very disappointed in you.

In all seriousness, huge red flag, and I'm really glad that you mentioned WhatsApp.  There are loads of other communication tools that are somewhat similar.  None of them is nearly as widely used by ordinary people as WhatsApp, and that's why you tend to see WhatsApp being used mostly if a recruiter ever asks you to switch over from communicating via Total jobs via Indeed, via email, and they say, " Let's switch over to WhatsApp”. I would say run, don't walk away from them

I agree totally anytime, whether it's on a job site or whether it's anywhere else that you're being asked to sort of change format, that is always a red flag; But when you are on a job board, what should I look for in a job ad to determine if it's real or if it's likely to be a fake job?

It's becoming increasingly difficult.  So a college recruiter is a job search site for candidates who are early in their careers, with zero to five years of experience.  We've been around for three decades, and it's always been a bit of a cat-and-mouse kind of game. As soon as the job search sites catch up to the scams that are being perpetrated out there, then something else will come along.

Years ago, you could look at a job ad, and you could see poor grammar, and it would just be obvious to you that it was written by somebody whose first language was not English, for example, And you know, if the job is in London or New York, it's pretty unlikely that their English language skills will be really poor in, in a job ad you would see things like company names being listed incorrectly, Microsoft. Corporation would instead show up on a job ad as like Microsoft Comma Inc. You know, things like that, that if you know enough about the company, you're gonna be able to identify it. And that was helpful when you were applying to jobs with large employers that had a a significant digital footprint. You could kind of look them up.

The scammers are much more sophisticated.  Now, large language models, LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, have enabled them to perpetrate these scams at scale and really help clean up a lot of those problems.

One thing that I would say is to use multiple signals.  Don't just rely on the information that.  Whoever posted the ad wants you to see whether it's legitimate or illegitimate.  You wanna check out that company, you want to check out that person. If you can identify the recruiter, the hiring manager, et cetera, Google them.  Go to sites like Glassdoor, go to sites like LinkedIn, and if in doubt.

Don't use the information in the job ad to contact the company to find out if they're a real company, because guess where that communication is gonna go.

Instead, go to Google.  Find a phone number, an email address, a contact us form, et cetera,  send them a message and say, Hey, I saw this job posting, or this recruiter contacted me about this position. I just want to verify that this is, this recruiter is who she says she is, and that the job is actually available.

You'll be amazed at how often that company will come back and say, no, that person doesn't work for us, no, that job is not available.

And the reason I say you'll be amazed at how often that happens is because you know your spidey sense, your intuition that something is off is probably correct. 

So when everything looks totally legitimate.  You're walking down the street, and there's a help-wanted sign in the window, you walk into the shop and you fill in an application or you walk in and they tell you to go to the website and then you do that. That's not, you're just not gonna have those same issues.

It's more about when you don't know that organization, when you don't know that recruiter; So reach out to the company independently not using the contact information that's in the ad and just verify that they are who they say they are. 

Absolutely. And if I can just add to that, if you are Googling a company, you still have to be careful to make sure that you do end up on the right website.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It, it's multiple signals; also going to a LinkedIn, if you see a company that says they have, you know, 26 stores in 17 countries and they do $18 billion in business, in, in, you know, copper, you know, whatever the product might be and then you go to their Google page, and there's a bunch of broken links, you know, you click on a link to the go to the contact page and it doesn't send you anywhere, it’s just, you go to LinkedIn and you see the company has 12 followers, but supposedly doing billions of dollars in sales again, run.

Now, let's say someone has fallen for a job scam. What should they do?

Probably curl up in the fetal position.  

You know, it depends upon how far down that rabbit hole you went. 

So if you just applied to the job, and now you're getting a recruiter coming back and they're saying something like, you know, “Hey, see you look like you're a great candidate, To make it easier for us to communicate, let's switch over to Telegram. Let's switch over to WhatsApp”, then just block 'em. Just move on. 

On the other hand, if you've already handed over your banking information, because they told you that they were gonna, you know, pay you monthly or the, you know, if you did some project, then they're gonna wire you money or send you money electronically. I would, I would just like immediately change your banking information.  Go and close your account, open up a new one.  It's gonna be a real pain, it’s gonna be very inconvenient, but it's a lot better than having them empty your bank account.

Unfortunately, there's very little recourse that the vast majority of these victims have because these companies are gonna be next to impossible to track down, and they're probably in countries where you're not gonna have any real access to, to the courts, to the judicial system. I mean, if somebody in Russia comes and scams you, what are you gonna do about it? 

Nothing. Yeah, there's nothing to do. You can't even get to Russia anymore to go and deal with it.

Yeah. You know, if somebody scams you and they live down the block from you, even then, it's like, well, it kind of depends on how bad the scam was then, then you call the police. You probably don't want to go knock on that person's door and subject yourself to potentially being the victim of physical violence.

But it, I think it just really depends. See on how bad. The harm is in terms of like what your next actions are, but usually it's gonna be a situation where hopefully the sting doesn't hurt too much and that you can move on and that next time you'll be a little bit more careful.

It's really awful because as hard as the job market is for everybody right now, you add this layer on top and it just breeds a lot of distrust between people, Very good people on both sides of that hiring table. The recruiter and the candidate now end up not trusting each other as much as they should, and that makes it harder for employers to hire, and it makes it harder for people to get hired.

I like to leave our listeners with one thing that they can do today that costs nothing or next to nothing to help protect them from scams. Can you think of something that doesn't cost money and maybe takes little or no time to reduce the chance of them falling for a recruitment scam? 

Set up a fake Gmail account. Well, not really fake, but set up a secondary Gmail account if you're joe.Smith@gmail.com, and that's what you use for all of your family, your banking, your Facebook login and all the rest of it. Create another Gmail account. Joe dot, Smith dot job apply, you know, something, or 20, you know the number 21. And just use that for your entire job search.

When you're finished with the job search, just close the account and walk away from it. That way, if you do apply to a fake job, at least that quote-unquote recruiter is less likely to have your real email address. That's one less piece of information that they have about you. 

Now that said, do take care in setting up that disposable email address, because remember, you're gonna be using that for real recruiters and real employers. So don't have it. Just be some gobbledygook, XR four TI, you know, exclamation 3 9 4. An employer's gonna look at that and like, what the heck is this? You know, have it make sense if you're a engineering major from Leeds? You can do something like Cindy engineer leads@gmail.com. Something like that would make sense for the employer.

Also, just do not hand over banking information. That's mostly what they're looking for from people. Most of the scams are: “I’m a fake employer. I'm going to send you some money. Now I've got access to your bank account or know what your banking information is, and then I might get you to send that money back. Oops, I overpaid you, so you need to send that money back to me. And then the reality is you end up sending them back 2000 pounds, but they've only sent you two pounds”.

If that's actually a really good tip and there are services out there that will let you also set up emails that you can just use once and then immediately throw away, but you set up on Google and it's free. 

Yes and there are some job boards that will essentially disguise you and they will route your application to the employer through their system. And that's mostly good when you're applying to small and medium sized employers. Most of the large employers want you to apply on their website. And so then having a Gmail, you know, or whatever, whatever system you want, Yahoo, whatever, is going to be quite helpful. 

Excellent. Well, thanks very much for joining us, Steve, and that's actually been really helpful. 

Cheers Cee 

If you are looking for work, particularly if you just finished school or if you're looking for recruits who are, you may want to check out College Recruiter, and you'll find them at collegerecruiter.com.

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