Rise in Employment Scams

Online scams have existed almost as far back as the creation of the Internet. They come in many different forms, such as credit card scams, lottery scams and even romance scams. Most of these involve some kind of identity theft and monetary loss to the victim.

Cybercrime statistics show that a minimum of 442 million individuals were impacted in 2022 alone, according to the FBI’s Internet crime records with 800,944 complaints registered that year. Nearly 33 billion accounts were breached in 2023 with the cost of these breaches predicted at 8 trillion dollars. The cost of cybercrimes is projected to reach 10.5 trillion by 2025 from 6 trillion in 2022. It is said that 80 percent of reported cybercrimes are generally attributed to phishing attacks.

Although employment related scams are nothing new, most recently, we have seen a sharp rise in employment scams and their sophistication. As the Covid-19 pandemic forced millions of people to stay home, they started looking online for employment opportunities. This resurgence in online employment searchers created an opportunity for scammers to exploit the unaware population for monetary gains as victims tend to be very cooperative and engaged. In some cases, victims were used to carry out ilicit activities without them having the slightest idea of what was going on.

So, how does an employment scam work? Scammers tend to use household company names that you trust and hold in high esteem, as well as their logos to post employments at authentic employment portals. Recently, in many cases, they have gone as far as to impersonate HR managers from these companies by accumulating their information, which is easily available on Internet platforms such as LinkedIn and company websites, to create fake accounts and email addresses. These fake websites, accounts and email addresses can easily be spotted by taking a second more thorough look at these employment postings. As victims of these scams tend to be excited and nervous upon the prospect of being hired by such prestigious entities, they tend not to notice the subtle changes.

For example, in December 2022, the Human Resources department at the insurance firm Protective Life started receiving calls and emails from individuals who had been offered jobs at the company. This was particularly odd since they didn’t recognize the positions or the applicants who were allegedly in the processes of being hired by Protective Life. The director of Protective Life’s Special Investigative Unit, Ryan Schwoebel, told Fraud Magazine that the scammers were using a fake website with information about the company taken directly from the Wikipedia page in their bid to look authentic.

They also used a fake website and email addresses to fool the applicants into thinking that they were applying for real employment opportunities. “Our company URL, which is connected to our email, is Protective.com,” Ryan further explained “But the emails website they saw ended with something like Protectivelife.com.”

Once the applicant is invested in the idea that they are a part of the selection process, that’s when the real scam starts. The first and most important sign that you are part of a fake employment scam is that the “HR manager” or the “employment agent” who is in contact with you on behalf of the company will start asking for information and documents that are considered private and should never be shared, such as your credit card information.

Scammers also use something as routine as a background screening to get monetary benefit out of the victims. It has been observed recently that scammers will congratulate the applicants on being selected for the position and will inform them that to complete the hiring process the applicant must go through a standard background screening as per company policy. Up until this point, the scam works exactly like any other authentic hiring process. It’s what happens next is the scam in action. The scammers ask the applicant to provide their banking information so that company can transfer funds either by bank transfer or crypto currency to the applicant to pay for the background screening to a third party. They might also ask the applicant to pay directly for the screening out of pocket on the promise to be reimbursed later. You should know that most background screenings are carried out by third party firms specialized in the field because of privacy laws in most countries but are never subject to receiving payments from the applicants and candidates participating in the screening process.

The truth is that any payment you make to these supposed background screening firms will never be reimbursed as that money goes straight into the scammers accounts which is then transferred multiple times until it’s far from any point of recovery. In cases in which they do transfer funds to the applicant’s private bank accounts for the payment of screening services, the applicant will unknowingly be participating in an elaborate money laundering operation, laundering dirty money for multiple crime syndicates. Jeff Thomson, senior intelligence analyst at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s anti-fraud Center, was quoted in an CBC article saying that these types of scams are often about using fake employees to launder dirty money through cryptocurrencies, which are harder to trace.

To stay clear of employment scams and other online frauds, follow some basic and simple guidelines.

1. Always check and double check the website and emails of the company that is offering the jobs. Look for anything odd or out of place. Usually, scammers will try to copy the same format and web design as the original but what they do not have access to is the web domain of that company. Always double check the URL and email addresses.

2. Do your own research, contact the company directly. If you suspect any foul play, informing the authorities can save countless others from the same type of scam. Another thing that is very consistent with online employment scams is that the position/conditions being offered will be too good to be true. Many fake employment scams offer incredible sounding benefits, flexible hours, opportunities with no experience required and pay checks which are disproportionally above the usual pay for that particular position. They will also start to hasten the process and put pressure on the applicant to share their personal data as soon as possible, indicating that otherwise they might lose out on the employment opportunity.

3. If the recruiting agent starts to ask for your personal information very early on in the recruitment process, it is a bad sign. Do not provide personal information such as Social Security number or your banking information as this can be used to create fake accounts in your name and launder money. Be careful of agents that always communicate information through messaging apps or social media platforms.

4. Most companies, if not all, have strict policies regarding the use of personal accounts or numbers when contacting their clients or applicants seeking to get a job. If you are contacted in such a manner, it’s more likely to be a scam than not.

5. Never accept an employment offer from a company that requires you to pay for your own equipment, training, or background screening. The scammers will assure you that the company will reimburse you but that is often false. Legitimate background screening services like Grupo GAT will provide you with all the information that you need and will make sure that your private information is protected by law with liability on their part. Screening processes never start without the candidate’s express authorization and information that the candidate considers is personal or not relevant to the process is never subject to use.

We hope that this article will help you avoid scams and scammers that seek to take advantage of people in search of a better future prospect.