Beware of Fake Job Scams

Anyone who’s been job hunting over the past few years knows how competitive the job market is and how the selection process can drag on. 

Countless people worldwide have gone through the same song and dance of applying for jobs, sitting down for interviews, waiting for feedback, and often getting rejected. It can be extremely frustrating, especially for those desperate for employment.

Scammers have found a way to exploit these people and their hunt for the perfect job, and that’s by offering “easy jobs”. Nowadays, the market is flooded with illegitimate job offers, all of which are offering a lot of money for minimal effort.

What Are Fake Job Scams?

Fake job scams have been around for a long time now. Back in the day, you used to see them advertised on TV, the radio, or the newspaper. However, as job hunting is now typically done online, it’s even easier for these scammers to cast a wide net and attract as many people as they can.

Scammers post job listings and pose as either employers or recruiters, make the offer seem tempting, and then lure people in under false pretenses. In most cases, the scammers will provide their victims with employment forms and ask them to perform certain duties before they even catch on to the fact something might be wrong. And once they do, it’s too late and the damage has been done.

The point of this scam, just like most others, is to get people to invest money or divulge their private information. This can further lead to identity theft, credit card scams, and so much more.

Different Types of Fake Job Scams

If you’re on the hunt for a new job now, you will probably run across some offers that seem too good to be true. But before you apply for or accept anything, think about what you’re getting yourself into. Not all good jobs as scams of course, but some amazing offers usually have scammers behind them.

Work From Home Job Scams

Working from home in any type of profession is always popular amongst job seekers. Receiving a paycheck from the comfort of your own house is something that many people dream of, and scammers are well aware of this. This is why their most common tactic is offering work-from-home jobs.

Usually, the scammers are offering a remote job and asking the person they “hired” to pay for their own work equipment with the promise of a refund with the first paycheck. But as soon as they send the money the scammers never buy the equipment or send a refund.

Fake Job Offer Emails

These emails are becoming a common occurrence. The target of the scam receives an email from a person claiming to be a recruiter or HR representative of a reputable company. The scammer claims they found your resume online and believe you would be the perfect person for a position. This scam happens across all kinds of industries.

At first, this may seem legitimate because recruiters often reach out to potential candidates like this. However, scammers also ask people to provide information a legitimate recruiter never would. This often includes bank account information, social security numbers, and identification documents.

Pyramid Schemes

Multi-level marketing scams, also known as pyramid schemes, are organizations that disguise themselves as legitimate businesses and recruit people to sell products, often calling these people investors. The point of this scam is to get investors to recruit more people, and then rinse and repeat.

However, the low-level employees never make any money from it, as it was cleverly designed to only make money for the people on top.

The investors are required to pay a fee just to have the right to sell whatever products the pyramid scheme is pushing and purchase the products themselves just so they can sell them to other people. And more often than not, these products are unsellable. 

The products that are being sold by MLM scam organizations are poor quality and made out of cheap materials, and the “investors” just end up losing money because of a lack of sales.

Historically, pyramid schemes always fail because the promoters aren’t able to make the sales required to keep the operation going. However, they can last for a few months or even a few years, which leads to a lot of people losing money due to all the fees they have to pay.  

Reshipping Job Scams

Reshipping scams often advertise themselves as convenient jobs that don’t require a lot of work and pay a great salary. All you would have to do is receive a package, repack it, and forward it to another location. Seems very simple at first, but there’s a sinister truth behind this particular scam.

If you sign up for one of these jobs, packages will come to your door, often filled with expensive merchandise, usually gadgets such as laptops and smartphones. However, this merchandise is always purchased illegally through credit card scams or just stolen. And when you reship them, you will become a participant in money laundering, which is a serious crime.

Additionally, if you sign up for a reshipping job scam, you will be sharing personal information with the scammers. This can put you at risk of identity theft, financial loss, and a severely damaged credit score. 

Not to mention that if you’re involved with money laundering, you can get into serious legal trouble and go to jail, even if you were an unveiling participant.

Final Thoughts

The job market is tough, and it has been for a while, which caused millions of people worldwide to fall for scams that promised them profit and security. But always remember that there is no such thing as “easy money” and the perfect job is just around the corner. It’s better to wait for the right opportunity than to lose money instead of earning it.