Even the people helping others find work aren’t immune to suspicious job offers.
Colleen Paulson, the founder of Ageless Careers, typically helps older executives find new jobs. She received an email for a position that matched her past experience with an eye-popping offer: The gig offered at least $900,000 a year.
Even though Paulson thinks the email was well-written and included a photo, the high pay for the job struck her as a red flag. There was another sign: It didn’t seem to come from an official company email domain.
“No one’s going to come and email me for a $900,000 a year job from a Gmail account,” Paulson said. “So you have to take that discretion and say, ‘If it’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t real.'”
Paulson suspects the sender did their research to gather information about her online; Paulson’s location and work history are on her public LinkedIn account. She suggests people who aren’t sure about whether a reachout is legit ask a friend for another opinion.
Take this quiz to see if you can spot job offer red flags
You may have received something similar: a text promising a high-paying work-from-home opportunity, a time-sensitive job offer, or a message saying to deposit a check before starting a job. Experts, job seekers, and workers shared some of the most common red flags to watch out for. As the job market gets trickier, people are more likely to fall for scams because they are desperate.
“The scams are getting more and more complex and harder to detect,” Paulson said. “I am afraid for people. It’s honestly horrible.”
It’s a tough time to find work in general, but especially rough for young people joining the workforce. A LinkedIn survey conducted by Censuswide of over 8,000 workers in various countries showed that Gen Z is more likely to experience scams.
Oscar Rodriguez, vice president of trust product at LinkedIn, said Gen Z may ignore warning signs because the job market for entry-level roles is competitive, and many newcomers aren’t familiar with standard hiring practices since they are newer to the workforce.
Here are some of the things to watch out for if you’re worried about getting scammed in your job hunt.
Leveraging public information
It’s easy for scammers to get information about job seekers in today’s digital world, so they can craft emails that seem familiar to the person’s experience. It also makes it easier to imitate real recruiters, so scammers come across as offering an actual opportunity.
“Recent advancements in AI have made it cheaper, faster, and easier to pretend to be someone that you’re not,” Rodriguez said.
Even though Bill Hague, executive vice president at media consultancy and research company Magid, isn’t looking for a new job, he suspects he has received job scams leveraging his public information. He cited one email that mentioned his past experience on his public LinkedIn profile. “At first, it didn’t strike me as a scam because they referenced my background,” he said.
Several things in the email made him skeptical, however — links to social media pages that didn’t work, “United States” as the address rather than a more specific location, and no posts made on the independent recruiter’s LinkedIn. The email also noted it was time-sensitive, high-priority, and was for a major company. “In any major corporation, you know they’ve all got internal HR and search folks. So that obviously set off another alarm,” he said.
Hague sees how it’s easy for people to fall for something that looks like it could be a real offer.
“There’s so much fraud going on across the internet, and obviously, mobile devices all make access pretty easy,” Hague said, adding, “people who get taken advantage of, whether it’s the elderly or people who are desperate or aggressively looking for a job, they’re the easiest targets.”
People worried about their LinkedIn profiles can check their settings to see how much they share with connections and search engines. People can also report accounts that seem suspicious.
Be skeptical of high-paying offers
Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor at Indeed, said job scams tend to increase when the job market is more challenging. She said common job scams involve being asked to hand over money, share personal details, or do free work.
“If you get a message and it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Rathod said. That can include a reachout promising high pay and flexibility, two factors job seekers tend to seek, but doesn’t lay out a specific position. “They keep these details vague on purpose because specific details would give you something to verify,” Rathod added.
Meanwhile, Rathod warned about messages that include a position that can’t be corroborated on an employer’s career page, as well as messages that promise a job without an interview.
Deanna Denham-Hughes tends to spend three days a week working on her portfolio and scouring job sites after being laid off in March.
Amid all the grunt work, she also has to be wary of too-good-to-be-true offers. One email said it was a “confidential” opportunity and promised high pay, but when Denham-Hughes reached out to the recruiter on LinkedIn, they said they hadn’t sent it.
“I don’t know what’s harder to receive: ‘Thank you, we’re not interested in you’ email from an actual employer or a fake offer from a con artist,” Denham-Hughes said.
Job seekers have to be careful of email addresses and URLs. Recruiter emails from personal accounts rather than an employer domain could be suspect. Other red flags include any extra or missing letters, or even letters used to make it look like another — for instance, an “r” and “n” together made to look like an “m.” People can also hover over email links without clicking them to check the address for typos or other red flags.
Read more stories about job hunting
Asking for money
Job seekers should also not send money to get a position. “No one who’s trying to hire you for a legitimate job listing is going to ask you for a payment prior to it,” Rathod said.
A blog post from the Federal Trade Commission said payment for equipment or expenses is a red flag. A company check can also be another scam technique. “The ‘check’ usually comes with instructions to send some of the money to someone else, often in the form of a wire transfer, crypto, or gift cards (or gift card PIN numbers),” the post said.
“The enthusiastic new hire will deposit the check and front the forwarded funds out of their own pocket, assuming the deposited check will cover the costs,” the FTC added. “By the time the bank tells the person the check is a phony, the ’employer’ is long gone — with untraceable cash or cards in hand. It’s a fake check scam dressed up as a job opportunity.”
Rathod said if you’ve been targeted by a scam, stop contact, don’t click links, and if you shared personal or financial information, change passwords and reach out to your bank or credit-card company.
Moving the chat elsewhere
Paulson said job seekers should also watch out for messages that try to move the conversation over to a chat app or similar.
Rodriguez said there’s a vulnerability window, where early on in the job-search process “bad actors basically try to move professionals or job applicants away from platforms like LinkedIn, and at the same time, job applicants have far less signal about the job or the recruiter or the company.”
Posing as an employer
Job seekers can also check against career pages to see if there are any known job scams. Job seeker Marcia Simmons took advantage of those warnings when she was trying to figure out whether emails from supposedly high-profile tech companies were real. They turned out not to be from the actual employers.
“Even though I was still suspicious, it’s just a letdown, especially when you think that possibly a company of that caliber saw something that you did or talked to somebody that you worked with and thought that you were worth approaching,” Simmons said.
False offerings aren’t stopping Simmons from powering through her job search.
“I have received some legitimate interest that I was a little bit skeptical about, and did research and found out it was a real email from a real person,” she said. “So while it’s made me more cautious, it definitely hasn’t made me say no to somebody who ended up being a real person offering a job.”
Have you experienced one of these job scams? Reach out to this reporter to share at mhoff@businessinsider.com.
Read the full article here
