Fired workers are inundated with fake job offers

 

Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easy for job seekers to dupe

Employment scams that use fake job opportunities to defraud applicants are on the rise and have found a new, prime target in laid-off tech workers.

According to Federal Trade Commission data, these schemes—which often include fake job listings, interviews with fake recruiters, and fake onboarding processes to steal job seekers money or identities—along with virtual recruiting and remote work. spread during the pandemic. Workforce experts and recent job-scam victims say scammers are now focusing on workers who have recently lost jobs, particularly those in the tech industry.

According to the FTC, the number of reported job scams nearly tripled to 104,000 between 2019 and 2021 and will continue to grow in 2022. The agency's data shows American workers could lose more than $200 million to employment scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019.

Gustavo Miller, a digital marketing expert, wrote a viral LinkedIn post chronicling his experience of recently being "hired" for a ghost job.

It started with an email from someone claiming to be a recruiter for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who reached out to him through his profile on a recruitment site for startup workers. The next day, Mr. Miller wrote, he did an online interview and received an offer for a remote contractor role, which he accepted after viewing the recruiter's LinkedIn credentials. Soon after, he received a link to an onboarding portal.

There, he was met virtually by a man who identified himself as a human-resources executive, who showed him how to order a laptop, headphones and other remote-work equipment. She realized she was being defrauded, she wrote, when she received an invoice for $3,200 and said subtle changes to the third-party website and the email address that sent it. They refused and there was little response to complaints, he said. Coinbase warns that only job listings from its website should be trusted and that legitimate recruiters for the company will use Coinbase email addresses.

Mr Miller's post received thousands of comments, many recounting similar experiences.

"I felt really stupid and naive when I discovered this, but I know this is not a silly scam," he wrote. "These people are pro, they know the status of standard remote-first jobs and the hiring culture of the tech industry."