Scam Remote Jobs: My Experience

You know the feeling. You’ve been applying for jobs, searching for clients, and generally spreading your resume and portfolio around just hoping for someone, anyone, to bite. Then it arrives. That acceptance email.

You can’t quite remember applying to this company, but you’ve applied to dozens of positions over the past few days so it’s hard to keep track. The job description they’re offering is what you’re looking for, with good benefits, pay, and it’s even remote. Then it hits you, that suspicion, because of something they’ve asked you or something that has been said.

Maybe they want an interview over some strange 3rd party app you’ve never heard of. Maybe they ask a simple question that was clearly answered on your resume, like what country you live in. Sometimes they’re even more bold, and they ask about your social security or address or other information.

You decide to do a bit of research, looking for a LinkedIn profile for the recruiter or some kind of company website. You find legitimate companies that are almost the same name but aren’t hiring, or even a half-finished LinkedIn company page that has employees. It’s like it’s almost real, but it’s still fishy. So, you decide to stop responding, and whomever has been in contact with you performs their last suspicious action. They never contact you again.

This has been my experience starting out, looking for positions with Copywriting, Editing, Proofreading, and even Data-Entry. Living in the Post-Covid world, where remote jobs are not just a fantasy but the standard, the hiring market has been flooded with available positions. Being that we all need to eat, and we trust that the hiring websites we use have taken steps to protect us, we apply left right and center for anything and everything that might provide us with an income.

Scammers see opportunity in these broad fields of hiring, and as such they create fake posts, or sometimes just research and view your profile on the hiring website. They contact you in hopes of stealing your identity, getting money from you, or even unknowingly recruiting you in their scams so that when shut down, you take the blame.

All this, and more, are some things I, and people close to me, experienced in the current job market. It’s my hope that by sharing some of these personal experiences it might help spread awareness about potential pitfalls.

1. The Direct Solicitation

This one is short and fairly self-explanatory, and I doubt any person with at least a rudimentary amount of knowledge of the internet would fall for it. In fact, your email account has likely filtered this into spam and given you warning that it’s suspicious and should not be trusted.

This scam was the boldest that I experienced, and part of you has to respect that. You receive an email offering you a job. They congratulate you, give you some basic details on what your work will be, and heavily highlight your pay and benefits. They just need a few itsy-bitsy things from you first.

They need your full name, address, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, and a few other odds and ends. Don’t worry though, they promise that this is a legitimate offer, and they need it to process your application properly.

It should go without saying, but if an email asks for your social security number, bank account info, or any other sensitive information you wouldn’t give to a random person on the street, don’t give it to them.

2. The Indirect Solicitation

This one is very similar to the first, the scammer just won’t be as bold about it. You’ll receive a congratulatory email about your stand-out resume. They have a job offer for you, though you can’t quite remember applying to this company directly. But they’re offering you good pay, in fact, that’s something heavily highlighted in the email.

All you need to do is contact their hiring manager…on a 3rd party app. The one I was asked to use was an app called Signal, but there are others as well. They give you the name and number of their “hiring manager” and ask you to contact them for further details and an interview.

You do a little research, and they do have a LinkedIn company page, but it’s a little odd, and the name they gave you for hiring manager isn’t exactly on there. You decide to go ahead anyways, download the signal app, and contact the person you were supposed to for the interview.

The “interview” turns out to be entirely text-based. Odd, but maybe you have a bit of social anxiety like me, and a text-based interview sounds like a dream come true. Then the questions start to come. This is where the similarities between the direct and indirect solicitations come in.

You get questions clearly answered on your resume, and not things like work experience. But your name, which you already told them in that text chat. They’re also responding unnaturally fast, almost like a robot is answering and recording your answers. If you continue a little further, they’ll begin asking for things like your address and, you guessed it, social security number.

Both the direct and indirect solicitation follow the same principles. They draw you in with the promise of a good remote job that you’ve been looking for. They highlight benefits and pay and use that as a means to rope you into giving away your identity.

Always do your research. Understand that if a company wants to interview you, it will not be done on a strange 3rd party app, and it certainly won’t be done via text. If it feels fishy, then it probably is.

3. The Too Easy and Too Good to be True.

This one is an odd one, because in a perfect world this would be an amazing opportunity.

You’re contacting by a client who wants you to do some basic advertising and data entry.

All they need you to do is go on Facebook Marketplace, or Craigslist, or some other similar website, and enter in some information for them. They are going to send you exactly the information you need to post. All you have to do is copy and paste, and you’ll get a substantial amount of money for doing relatively little work. For me, this was advertising apartments for rent. I was offered $900 a week to make 5 posts a day.

This one differs from the other two, as the person contacting you is responsive. If you email them, they’ll email you back. It’s clearly not a robot or automated response, as they answer your questions. Some of them at least. They even say they’ll pay you through whatever means you want.

It all seems too good to be true…because it is. This is one I almost fell for. The person emailing you is always vague about who they work for, and why they can’t simply post this themselves if they just need you to copy and paste the information they provide.

Doing a little research, I found out why. It’s because what you’re advertising doesn’t actually belong to your scammer. They’ll find something online, a property or object, get the picture and information, and then have someone else post it somewhere for a much lower price. The hope is that, through the prospect of a good deal, they’ll be able to elicit an initial payment from someone who thinks they just got a steal of a price!

However, the obvious now might have occurred to you. When the hammer falls, when people realize this is fake and they got scammed, who is the only person they’re able to connect this to? You. It’s essentially an attempt to bring you into the scheme, unknowingly, and then leave you holding the bag when it’s all said and done.

As sad as it is to say, the old mantra holds true. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Always do you research, and always get exact information from clients.

4. The Dream Job

This one is the most complicated, and the most conniving. It’s not something I personally experienced, but it did happen to my partner. I was certainly tricked by it, and they nearly were as well.

It starts the same as most others. You get an email offering you congratulations on the opportunity for a job. It has all the same bells and whistles but doesn’t seem too suspicious. You do some research, and are able to find the company on LinkedIn, as well as the hiring manager. There is also an official company website, though there does seem to be some inconsistencies.

Never-the-less, you continue forward. This is a dream job, perhaps as an on-team editor, or a copywriter, all in a remote position so you can do so in the comfort of your home. Good pay, good benefits, good everything. They have a legitimate interview, and afterwards you are informed that you got the job!

As with all new employees, you’re going to need some special equipment. For that, the company will be providing you with a set amount of money. This is where the first trap is. They’ll ask you for your bank information so they might directly deposit the money into your account.

Do not, under any circumstances, do this. I will explain why once the story has concluded.

You are also offered instead the option of a check mailed to you. Suspicious enough but still hopeful, you take that option and they mail you the check. It takes a long time, and even though you say you’re ready to do work now with the setup you have, they insist you wait until all the proper equipment has been purchased.

The check arrives, and you take it to your bank. My partner was lucky, in that the bank was very thorough, but not everyone who got caught up in this scheme was. They told her it was a fake check, and that when that had been caught by the system in a few days, the money would have been subtracted from her account. After she had purchased all the necessary equipment already.

I’ll admit, I don’t fully understand this scam completely. Giving up your bank information is obvious enough, but I am unsure how they managed to extract money from you with the fake check. Regardless, you are now down thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.

If and when you are fortunate enough to be hired at a good company, and they need you to have certain equipment, be assured that they will purchase and ship what you need, rather than giving you a check to purchase it yourself.

6. The End

These are the four scenarios of scam that I’ve either been a part of directly, or someone close to me has nearly fallen into. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, and there are more out there with more complicated and devious tactics. Not to mention that not every suspcious email you see, or offer you get, is actually a fake.

In this Post-Covid age, where remote work is much more common and we’re all hoping that we can snag that dream job while enjoying the comforts of our own home, it’s a shame that we can’t trust what is offered to us at face value. It’s because we want to work, we want to earn legitimately, and to show our craft to others that it’s so tragic we need to enter every arrangement with suspicion. We might even miss out on amazing opportunities because it just doesn’t seem legitimate.

The only advice I can offer is this. The job-search is always difficult, and now it’s harder than ever. Sometimes a scam is almost better than rejection, because at the very least we get some kind of response rather than silence. But you only need to succeed once to get that job you want.

Do your research, remain suspicious, and you can sort what’s real from what’s an attempt to steal from you.

Article can also be found on Medium: Original Post