Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers: Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers

Wall Street Journal ^ | 01/10/2023 | Imani Moise

[SeekAndFind]

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

These schemes—which often involve fictitious job listings, interviews with fake recruiters and sham onboarding processes to steal job seekers’ money or identities—proliferated during the pandemic alongside virtual hiring and remote work, according to Federal Trade Commission. Scammers now appear to be zeroing in on workers who have recently lost jobs, particularly in the tech industry, workforce experts and recent job-scam victims say.

The number of reported job scams nearly tripled to 104,000 between 2019 and 2021 and remained elevated in 2022, according to the FTC. U.S. workers lost more than $200 million from employment-related scams in 2021, up from $133 million in 2019, agency data show.

Gustavo Miller, a digital marketing specialist, wrote a viral LinkedIn post chronicling his experience of recently being “hired” to a phantom job.

It began with an email from someone claiming to be a recruiter for cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, who reached him via his profile on a recruiting site for startup workers. The next day, Mr. Miller wrote, he did an online interview and got an offer for a remote contractor role, which he accepted after looking over the recruiter’s LinkedIn credentials. Soon after, he got a link to an onboarding portal.

There, he met virtually with a man who identified himself as a human-resources official, who told him how to order a laptop, headphones and other remote-work equipment. He realized he was being duped, he wrote, when he received an invoice for $3,200 and spotted what he called subtle changes to the third-party website and email address that sent it. He refused and got little response when he complained, he said. Coinbase warns that only job listings from its website

[HonkyTonkMan]

Frank Rizzo, did you ever get Sparky the Clown to show up at your party?

[FrankRizzo890]

Nahhh, he said he mostly does children’s shows. He’s not into the little scene we’d have going on there.