Aly McConnell was thrilled when a message popped up in her email inbox offering her a remote position with Insurify, an insurance comparison shopping website. The recruiter assured her she was a top candidate and offered her unlimited PTO, as well as other enviable benefits. Ms. McConnell had been mass-applying for remote positions after her […]
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Aly McConnell was thrilled when a message popped up in her email inbox offering her a remote position with Insurify, an insurance comparison shopping website. The recruiter assured her she was a top candidate and offered her unlimited PTO, as well as other enviable benefits.
Ms. McConnell had been mass-applying for remote positions after her company experienced layoffs in 2023 – and while she didn’t remember applying to Insurify, she was happy and relieved when the offer came in. When the recruiter asked her to download a chat app and became pushy, asking for banking and Social Security information via unencrypted email, Ms. McConnell became skeptical and reached out to Insurify’s "head of people" on LinkedIn, to see if the job offer was legitimate.
“They said, 'no, we haven't been talking with anybody right now. We just posted that. I don't see you're an applicant in the system,’” said Ms. McConnell, who then realized she had been speaking with someone posing as an Insurify representative.
“After that, I started only applying locally because I was a little bit hesitant to apply remote because I'm like, ‘well, I might get scammed again,’” she said.
Unfortunately, Ms. McConnell’s experience is not unique – job scammers are evolving with employment and tech trends, taking advantage of job seekers in a tight market.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), people lost $367 million to business and job opportunity scams in 2022, a nearly 76% increase from 2021. What’s more, the median loss was a whopping $2,000. Compare that to the $650 median loss for all fraud types combined in 2022.
Chris Coleman, president of the Iowa division of the Better Business Bureau, said he has colleagues who field constant calls from people inquiring about or reporting job scams. “We provide information to people hundreds of thousands of times a year,” he said, noting that the organization’s pages on job scams get 1.5 million hits a year just for Iowa alone.
Adam McCoy, director of recruiting and operations for the Skywalk Group, has worked in the job recruiting business for 15 years and has seen a marked uptick in job scams, which he attributes to the vulnerability of workers in a challenging economy.
“The cost of living has outpaced wages in some industries,” he said, noting that inflation and company downturns can create the perfect storm for scams to occur, calling scammers “opportunists.”
Scammers evolve
According to a study by the Better Business Bureau (BBB), an estimated 14 million people are exposed to employment scams every year. Most scammers used online recruiting platforms to target their victims. Gone are the days when charlatans used classified ads for stuffing envelopes and yard signs on street corners advertising get-rich-quick schemes working from home. Today, scams are hard to spot because they often look like the real thing. Sophisticated technology has enabled scammers to create legitimate-looking websites and impersonate real companies. Recruiting companies have seen an uptick in automated “reach out” technology to reach as many applicants as possible, changing the pitch to match market conditions – for example, responding to inflation by promising more wages. “The more messages they get out there, the more lines they get out there in the water, the more likely they are to hook a fish,” said Mr. McCoy. Job scammers even go so far as to connect with recruiting companies by impersonating candidates to get competitive information about real jobs the company is recruiting for. In some cases, the scammers impersonate real employees and request the company change direct deposit bank account information to pocket the money. “We've had to put (in) tremendous amounts of protection,” said Mr. McCoy, speaking of Skywalk Group. “We've had to change our email system, even with how emails that are coming in externally are flagged…we've also done a tremendous amount of development and training of our employee base on how to spot fake emails and phishing campaigns.”Likely targets
According to the BBB study, the largest group of reports were from those 25-34, accounting for 28.2% of the BBB Scam Tracker reports, followed by those 35-44, with 21% of reports. Mr. McCoy said the younger workforce – between ages 18-25 – can also be “more susceptible (to job scams) due to their limited experience in navigating the job market.” One young job seeker learned about job scams the hard way. Liz Schultz, a second-year Kirkwood Community College student majoring in journalism and mass communication, said shortly after she launched her LinkedIn account last February, a scammer posing as a recruiter reached out to her. The recruiter had multiple mutual connections and offered a large amount of money to Ms. Schultz to market cutlery, claiming it was salary-based. The company website seemed legitimate, and because he seemed well-known due to their mutual connections, Ms. Schultz agreed to a Zoom interview. Ms. Schultz said the interview was “weird” – cameras were turned off and the interviewer did not respond to verbal questions, only answering in the chat box. Responses via text message seemed automatic and generated, and when Ms. Schultz was slow to respond, the recruiter would ask, “are you still there?” When he demanded her email address, ZIP code, school email and phone number, she grew suspicious and did some investigating to see if the job offer was a scam. “It was difficult to determine if the company was real or not, since it was remote,” said Ms. Schultz. When she discovered the job opportunity was not real, she removed the scammer as a connection. Today, she is a little more wary of virtual job offers. “This certainly makes me feel skeptical that there are a lot of scams going on, and that if a company does do a really good job of masking that they are not real, that someone could certainly fall for that and give them their personal information,” she said. Moving forward, “I think that now it's a little bit easier to spot what is real versus what isn't.” Ms. Schultz has some advice for other college students new to the job market. “I would say certainly be wary of who you are in contact with and do your research. Make sure they (company) has an actual website, that this is an actual person. If you are emailing them, it is important to see if they're local or if they're not local. And if they are local, see if there's a public place you can meet them – at their company site, if that's an option.”Types of scams
Job scams are as varied as they are omnipresent. According to the BBB, there are several types of scams currently operating, aside from remote offers:- Reshipping – scammers enlist people to receive the ordered goods, repackage them and send them out of the country, and the worker is never paid.
- Fake checks – checks aren’t widely used anymore, but many scammers use editing software to create business checks that look like the real thing. When the victim tries to cash it, the check bounces and funds are deducted from their account.
- Secret shoppers - victims receive fake checks they deposit into the account and are told to wire transfer part of the money from the received check, write up a report on their experience at the store, and keep the rest. This can also take the form of gift cards; after purchasing the gift cards with promises of compensation, victims send the gift card number to the scammer.