For the past two years, legitimate job postings on Indeed and Glassdoor have been replaced by scams. If you’re tricked, the scammers aren’t satisfied with your contact info in your CV, they reach out via email to request that you connect on an encrypted messenger app where they can privately scam you out of thousands in pre-hire “fees.”
Applicants now have to add vetting job postings to their repertoire, which adds time and effort to an already stressful process. Things like researching the supposed company in need of labor, and digging into reports against them.
Protect yourself and assume any job posting is fake until proven otherwise. In the US, you should report any scams you became aware of.
Edit: add the following: @[email protected] recommends reaching out via phone or email to your nearest job service office, if you’re seeking employment. These places are federally funded by our taxes, so they should be able to answer questions and help guide you to whatever your best options are, even if that includes helping you find remote work with out-of-state employers.
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Something else to be aware of is compromised LinkedIn profiles. I was recently contacted by a very real looking profile on LinkedIn, who was supposedly recruiting for a very real position at a very real company that the profile actually worked for. Red flags were:
- Bad english/spelling in messages
- Compensation a little too good to be true
- Sounded too easy to ‘get’ the job
- Person’s job title had nothing to do with recruitment until very recently
- ‘Application form’ they sent me looked a little bogus
They wanted me to fill out a form with all my info., including SSN, and send photocopies of my ID. When I asked for an email address at the company in question to send everything to, they ghosted me.
Yikes, that one almost got me. Advice here is to always manually ‘two factor’ identify people who contact you out of the blue.
Safe hunting folks.
Yeah… I may have gotten scammed on Dice because I did that… I work in IT where tons of the recruiters are Indian/Pakistani and two for different jobs reached out to me and asked for that. Tons of jobs want background checks because some require security clearance so in my mass sending out of like 50 resumes I did so, and about half ask for a SSN. I thought about it like two or three days later and got a credit report and so far it’s clean.
You can freeze your credit for free. No credit lines can be opened while it’s frozen. To open a credit line, you go to the agency that they use and unfreeze it. They all support “unfreeze temporarily for X amount of time” as well, which makes it easy.
You have to do it at all 3, but once its frozen, just ask anyone who you want a loan from who they use, login to the site, then unfreeze it for a week.
Literally no concern about someone fucking with your credit after that.
Thanks for the info! I’m in the US too BTW 🙂
When offering such advice, you should mention the region where you know this can be done.
Sure. The united States. The law that makes credit freezes free is federal, so it applies to the whole country.
Not just LinkedIn profiles: there was a case out here near DC a while ago where a well known company leased out their function space for training meetings. Using a compromised company account, a set of scammers set up some fake recruitment profiles, leased out the meeting space for “software training,” and did some “mass hiring” where 30 individuals had their credentials scanned and duplicated. The effect was someone from the recruiting company was contacting you, you had a face-to-face where you got offered an in-person, you showed up to their offices, and got a “job offer pending a background check,” with a date of hire in official-looking emails. You sent in your SSN, copies of your passport and driver’s licence, and after a few weeks, they tell you to show up for orientation. Only, the day these people showed up, the company was confused and had never heard of you. The people you supposedly spoke to had never heard of you. And your identity was stolen, and huge loans and charges started showing up in your credit report.
Yikes.
I always check if the job offer is also on the companies website
My SO got a “job offer” from a nonexistent company that 20 min of research uncovered a single applicant being scammed out of $75k when they shared bank details, presumably for setting up direct deposit.
The “company” didn’t even have a website, but just because they were lazy doesn’t mean other scammers won’t go the extra mile to make a real-looking website with postings. Its a tough world out there…
Mine was “Lone Pine Village Company”
Offer was through LinkedIn, and they sent me a “you’ve been selected” email. The interview process was going to be over email 🚩, through some guy that wasn’t cc’d on the email 🚩, and had a [email protected] style email address 🚩.
When i started looking into it, the job posting was removed 🚩, the company page no longer exists🚩, and the only links in the email were the email address to some Gmail address 🚩, no company website even through Duck Duck🚩.
Duck scammers, I just want a job, a ducking purpose other than “purchase product, consume content”.
My SO was skeptical from the start, but when they sent an email from an impressively obfuscated email address, that was the end. The alias had over 100 characters including specials, and the domain was the same.
This is racist against ducks
Got any bread?
I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.
The company I work at would fail this test about two thirds of the time.
Yup. Between all the time checking for legitimacy and evaluating the company, it’s a huge pain in the ass to look for jobs all day…and even when you find one you enter the same information over and over because autofill from resume doesn’t work…
My major problem with job bords is that almost same companies that are shown on the top. I wish there was a blacklist feature
Between that and how poor the search function is. “IT Support” shouldn’t be bringing up car mechanic jobs…
Any “job” that requires you to pay anything up front is a scam. Period.
The internet as a whole is just absolutely overrun with bots and scammy bullshit. It’s gotten way out of hand and AI is only making it worse.
Worse… Or… Better?
I’ve gotten a few jobs via indeed, real businesses still use it, but it’s so chock full of scams and fake listings that I do things the old fashioned way now. Call up the company you want to work for, ask for their HR department if they have one, ask for the head of the department you want to work for if they don’t, talk to the person for 2 minutes about who you are and what you do, don’t be a dingus, ask for a direct email to submit your resumé and cover letter. I always get a callback doing this method.
What kind of companies are you applying to? I’m pretty sure if I tried this with most of the places I’ve bee in applying to in the tech field, they would just laugh it off and say they don’t have that information.
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s”
I’ll have to try this, thanks!
Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.
For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.
I can’t wait to retire and fuck off.
Re….tire? What is this “retire” thing you are talking about?
It’s winter. It’s a good idea to have fresh new tires in case the roads get slippery.
Winter, you say. It felt like spring yesterday.
Has something to do with “car ownership” I believe.
It’s when you repeatedly put up with the same bullshit and get exhausted.
Its what people used to do when they were done working at the end of their career to live out the end of their lives
It has been replaced by the 9,45, or heart attack retirement plans for the most part
I went through this process once.
Submitted my details, they contacted me to set up an “interview” over telegram (a program I didn’t have and downloaded just to see what would happen, I knew it was a scam by that point)
So I went into it, they ask some generic questions they don’t take enough time to read (and filling them with nonsense doesn’t matter) and at the end they ask for a photocopy of your id and social security card (much like a real job, which is a problem in and of itself) and send to some shady email created with that company name @hotmail or some shit.
The company itself was real, the job posting was real, but the job posting was 3 years old, and I had to call the company to verify it wasn’t theirs. I also provided them with the posting link so they could follow up with indeed if they wanted to.
It’s not very elegant, but I guess desperate people don’t really do to much thinking about it…
During my most recent job search, the most annoying thing I saw was “resume consultants”
They’d reach out like an interested recruiter, but very quickly get to the sales pitch
I think all states have state agencies with their own job postings that have been better vetted than those on sites like Indeed or Monster. It works a little bit differently in each state, but you should be able to find information about job service offices in your state with contact information so you can ask about the details.
You still have to be somewhat wary of scams because some can slip through, but I believe there is a verification process for the job postings in these databases.
In my area it’s like they want you to be poor. Those legitimately posted listings in my area are exclusively “scams”, in that they will technically hire some people through those listings, but in reality they’re just hiring immigrant labour for pennies on the dollar, and using state-funded labour agencies to promote these jobs which objectively could not support American citizens. I’ve seen one listing that said they wanted harvesters for crops, they were paying by the amount picked, not an hourly wage. This is a classic scam where you end up getting less than minimum wage, and the Federal government has to step in after the fact to get you up to the disgustingly low minimum wage to make up for that discrepancy.
I haven’t seen this personally in my state’s database, and if this is happening in your state then it should be reported to the federal DOL Wage and Hour Division: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd
There are lots of ways to make farm workers exempt from the minimum wage. It’s fucked up by design
This sounds like a good option, although for job seekers looking for remote work, they might assume they are missing out by looking only in a single state.
Just being aware that employers like “Global Consulting” might not be real, and their HR rep is actually hoping to scam you is half the battle. The work that goes into finding work is increasing…
This is true, and again this is handled at the state level, but I know my state’s database does include postings for remote work, though I’m not sure if it includes all of them.
In any case, I’d actually encourage reaching out via phone or email to your nearest job service office, if you’re seeking employment. These places are federally funded by our taxes, so they should be able to answer questions and help guide you to whatever your best options are, even if that includes helping you find remote work with out-of-state employers.
Very good information. Added to my post.
Thank you!
What’s the best place to look for jobs these days? Going on indeed floods me with endless “insurance sales” positions. I tried Dice, but almost every job is wildly out of range for experience to pay. I’ve devolved down to scrolling over an area on google maps and clicking businesses to check their websites.
Networking. Every good job I’ve had and every positive move I’ve made has been possible through knowing the right people.
I know networking can suck for lots of people, but it’s an essential skill.
Indeed has always sucked anyway
Indeed.
This is literally what public/private key signing was invented for.
The person affiliated with the company signs their posting/emails with their private key, and the company maintains a list of all public keys corresponding to anyone working for them. That way, anyone outside the company who is allegedly talking to someone from a certain company can validate the signature against the public key to ensure it came from who they say they are.
So many “sales” places reached out to me while I was job hunting, my god
Clear scam mills designed to make you data harvest on people by canvasing door to door and if you fail to make a sale the company gets their data from you for free at least
Went to their first day onboarding and it was 6 hours of introductions and repeated company slogan bullshit, left after hour 3 of doing shit in another window out of pure boredom
