For the past two years, legitimate job postings on Indeed and Glassdoor have been replaced by scams.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: @LinkOpensChest_wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.
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.
When offering such advice, you should mention the region where you know this can be done.
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 first.last12345@Gmail.com 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”.
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.
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
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.
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.
