‘I didn’t really get too suspicious until almost the end’: Why employment scams are on the rise

Welcome to Fast Company Daily, our new daily newsletter on LinkedIn, featuring our top story of the day as well as a roundup of recently published articles. First time seeing this? Please subscribe.

BY Jessica Klein

Marcus Ramos, 50, had been out of a job for nearly a month when he got an email from a recruiter named Glen with an enticing offer. For a base pay of $2,400 a month, Ramos could work from his Las Vegas home sending out packages for a company called Filly Shipping, with a promised $40 bonus for each package he mailed.

The recruiter said he’d found Ramos’s résumé on Indeed, so when the job interview came around, he barely asked Ramos any questions. He said he’d learned enough from Ramos’s résumé to know he was the right person for the job, thanks to Ramos’s previous shipping and receiving experience. Instead of asking Ramos questions, the recruiter promptly gave a description of the work: Ramos would receive packages, replace the return address with his own, and send them on to another address.

While this offer immediately “felt kind of funny” to Ramos, he had his wife and grandson to support. Plus, the job seemed flexible enough that he could do it while continuing to look for something else, or maybe even alongside another job.

Nearly a month of receiving, relabeling, and sending out packages went by. Filly Shipping monitored his work on a website, where he “had to login three times a day,” Ramos says. He was in regular contact with Glen and two others, who checked in every time he was supposed to get a package.

“I didn’t really get too suspicious until almost the end,” says Ramos. They started calling daily, saying he had to mail a few more packages before they could pay him. When he finally finished, they went dark. “Then two days later, they booted me out of the website,” he says.

Ramos had fallen victim to an employment scam, a type of fraud that’s been going on for years but has grown even more prevalent in the wake of the pandemic, according to experts. Based on data from the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker and a Google survey from March 2020, roughly 14 million are exposed to employment scams per year, resulting in $2 billion lost. Between the start of 2020 and September 2022, the BBB received nearly 9,000 employment scam reports–the third most prevalent scam type reported.

A 2020 BBB study on employment scams describes the pandemic as having created a “perfect storm” for such scammers. They could target more people in dire financial straits who were desperate for flexible or remote jobs.

WHAT DOES AN EMPLOYMENT SCAM LOOK LIKE?

Over the past decade, says AARP’s director of fraud victim support Amy Nofziger, the volume of callers reporting such scams to AARP’s fraud hotline has remained fairly steady, but the nature of the scams has shifted. Scammers “follow the headlines,” she says, and have been profiting off both the pandemic-fueled trend of work-from-home and the increased reliance on online hiring.

Most of these modern hiring scams can be broken out into two types: reshipping scams, like the one Ramos fell victim to, and fake check or prepaid gift card scams. The former account for “the vast majority of scam job offers” reported to the BBB, says Josh Planos, spokesperson for the BBB’s investigations initiative. In these scams, he describes, organized crime units ask victims to reship stolen goods (without, of course, informing them that they’re stolen), creating a complicated pathway to obscure the goods’ origins. 

In fake check scams, “employers” send “new hires” a check to pay for items they’ll allegedly need for the job, like home office supplies. After depositing the checks, victims will appear to have money in their accounts, which they use to buy supplies from a vendor provided by the fake employer. The supplies never show up, and the victim’s bank flags the check as fake, removing that money from their accounts—meaning the victims used their own money to pay for supplies they never receive. Prepaid gift card scams work similarly.

“More than a third of the jobs scam complaints that we received involved fake checks,” says Planos, adding that the FTC found a 65% increase in fake check complaints between 2015 and 2020. Anecdotally, he’s seen these types of scams perpetrated most against younger job seekers, who may not have as much experience with checks and may be less likely to find depositing one at the start of a new job suspicious. “We saw that the largest group of job fraud victims were between the ages of 25 and 34 . . . people who are navigating independent life for the first time,” says Planos.

Planos shared statements with Fast Company from several victims in that age group, including someone named Sarah, who was contacted by a scammer pretending to be a representative of The Humane Society, where she’d applied for a job via Indeed. After a convincing interview with someone posing as a real staffer, Sarah was sent what she later learned were fake checks to buy home office supplies. When “problems” arose with her purchases (which her “employers” blamed on COVID-19 and a holiday rush), she was asked to pay other vendors via Zelle, CashApp, and Apple Pay. She ultimately lost $7,000.

There are some rules to follow to avoid these scams. “If you’re ever asked to get a check and deposit it and then send money out, it’s a scam. If you’re ever asked to purchase prepaid gift cards . . . it is 100% a scam,” says Nofziger. Same goes for new employers asking you to use cryptocurrency machines or to immediately supply them with bank account information or Venmo details.

But even when victims notice these red flags, like in Ramos’s case, they can be easy to ignore. “Vulnerability breeds scams,” says Planos. “These are folks who are largely being pulled from the margins, who really don’t have a lot of time to sit and wait for that great opportunity to come to them.”

HOW CAN YOU PROTECT YOURSELF?

Ramos’s scammers engaged with him primarily by phone, calling or texting from a variety of numbers originating in states ranging from Colorado to Florida. In addition to his initial contact Glen, two others got in touch with Ramos regularly, using presumably fake names and only identifying themselves as members of the company’s “shipping department.”

Not much is known about these scammers by the organizations that track victim reports, like AARP and the BBB. The Department of Justice didn’t respond to Fast Company’s request for comment. But both Nofziger and Planos say most of these criminals are from “overseas,” working out of call centers. This means they’re operating out of places with “call center infrastructure,” says Planos, specifically citing Eastern Europe, Russia, and Nigeria. They’re largely targeting people in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, Nofziger adds.

“With the reshipping scams, these are criminal enterprises. These are not slapstick operations,” says Planos. “These are well-oiled machines that have keywords down, that are paying for SEO [and] very visible social media ads.”

With scammers operating internationally, it’s difficult to police them from the U.S. That shifts the burden to job platforms to keep scammers off.

“We use technology and teams of experts to find and remove jobs that don’t meet our standards,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said via email. They shared the link to a blog post in which LinkedIn reports using a combination of artificial intelligence and “teams of experts” to remove fake accounts and scams, estimating that “automated defenses” are catching the vast majority (96% to 99%) of both.

In a statement Indeed says it uses a “dedicated search quality team…deploying a variety of techniques to assess the suitability and validity of job listings [removing] tens of millions of job listings each month that do not meet our quality guidelines.” Indeed also says it encourages job seekers to report any suspicious advertisements to them or to the police.

That said, rooting out scammers on job sites is akin to “playing whack-a-mole,” says Planos, as new ones keep cropping up, and veteran scammers keep evolving. Plus, scammers don’t always advertise on Indeed or LinkedIn–they can just drop the job boards’ names to great effect, as in both Ramos and Sarah’s cases.

Coming forward as a victim, Nofziger and Planos agree, is one of the best ways to stop scammers, because it helps others identify red flags. But the shame of falling for an employment scam can keep victims quiet.  

Besides costing Ramos money to ship out packages, getting involved in a hiring scam affected him psychologically. “It makes me feel like I cannot really trust [anybody] anymore,” he says. He’s still looking for work, but more cautiously. But to find a new job, Ramos has had to bounce back: “You’ve just got to pick up the pieces and move on.”

In case you missed it...

Follow us on LinkedIn,  Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Medium.