Remote work scams target laid-off Americans with fake interviews

Less than 24 hours after a human resources director found her on LinkedIn and conducted a 15-minute Zoom interview, Sinoha Rivas received an unreal job offer.
 
“She claimed to have an urgent need for a Senior Technical Recruiter who would be hiring [and] building out their own junior recruiting team,” Ms. Rivas wrote in a recent post on the job recruiting website. “When I started asking questions to understand this fake role that made no real sense to me, I could tell she started getting frustrated or annoyed.”
 
Ms. Rivas, a Dallas, Texas-based recruiting specialist who had just lost her Facebook job in a mass layoff at Meta, decided to dig around rather than accept. Her research uncovered several red flags.
 
She could not confirm key details from the company’s LinkedIn page, and the woman who interviewed her was “extremely vague” about them. Then she found a Reddit post saying another job seeker had reported the HR director to the FBI for soliciting $10,000 as the price of starting a job.
 
Ms. Rivas is among thousands of laid-off tech, finance and retail workers receiving dream offers from scammers posing as headhunters to steal their money or personal information. The scams target the increased number of Americans working virtually during the pandemic by setting up fake companies, job listings and online interviews.
 
Third-quarter reports of employment scams nearly tripled between 2020 and 2021 from 7,324 to 21,848, according to the most recent data from the Federal Trade Commission. And experts say the tally is rising as employers conduct layoffs amid fears of a coming recession.  
 
Nearly 20% of organizations plan to reduce headcounts in upcoming months, according to the National Association of Business Economics. And 61% of Americans responding to a recent Talent.com survey expressed concerns about their job security in the face of a recession.
 
Criminals taking advantage of this situation have graduated from “dumb” robocalls and spam emails to “smarter” imitations of online hiring practices, according to John Gilmore, director of research at DeleteMe.
 
“Organized fraud rings have become more technologically sophisticated and able to use simple methods common to many direct marketers for targeting specific audiences with types of fraud where they have a higher chance of success,” said Mr. Gilmore, whose Boston-based firm “scrubs” the personal information companies sell to online data brokers.
 
These fraudsters have benefitted from federal “COVID-related benefits” keeping people at home and from related changes to “how we work,” he added in an email.
 
“Now that millions of Americans are working from home full-time and looking for other remote work-from-home opportunities, the idea of seeking out and gaining employment from people you may never meet in person is increasingly common,” Mr. Gilmore said.
 
Job scams cost Americans about $2 billion annually, according to the Better Business Bureau.
 
The FTC received more than 22,000 employment fraud reports from July to September of 2022 alone, totaling $78 million in losses.
 
While some online frauds solicit direct payments from victims for “work-related equipment,” others farm personal information like Social Security and bank account numbers to other gangs. Many use job sites to build databases of recently unemployed workers as potential targets.
 
That pool of victims has swelled during the pandemic. The U.S. remains 3.2 million workers short of its pre-pandemic labor force participation rate, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
 
Con artists have paid close attention to jobless Americans looking to work from home, according to Zulfikar Ramzan, chief scientist at cybersecurity firm Aura.
 
“The sad fact is these scammers are following the news to see what industries are being affected by layoffs,” said Mr. Ramzan, whose company is based in Boston. “If there was no value in this type of fraud, they wouldn’t be spending time and effort on these activities.”
 
There are ways to identify the scams, however.
 
In work-from-home scams, fraudsters place online ads for a remote job where the applicant can earn thousands of dollars a month with little effort. Such “jobs” range from reshipping products to selling them to friends and require applicants to pay for certifications, software or starter kits.
 
In job placement service scams, cybercriminals pose as staffing agencies or headhunters to promote outdated or fake job openings, even charging fees for phony “services.”
 
Other variations of the hustle involve asking potential employees for wire transfers to move money between accounts, or sending a fake check to reimburse applicants for supplies that never come. Most of the scams convey a false sense of urgency.
 
Safety experts caution that legitimate employers never ask up front for money, Social Security numbers or a driver’s license. And real HR directors never insist on using private email addresses or social media apps — including iMessage, WhatsApp or Telegram — to communicate.
 
Victims caught in the scams should alert their banks and credit card companies, file a fraud alert with a credit bureau and make an identity theft report to the FTC at identitytheft.gov. They should also contact their local police department and a federal anti-fraud hotline.
 
And employers can help thwart the scams by requiring that people work in person again.
 
“Sure, these scams were already out there, but now they’re targeting Americans who want to work from home or secure childcare,” said Michael Austin, a former chief economic adviser to two Kansas governors and economist at the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Project 21. “It seems the scammers have found a new angle to reel in their victims, and Americans are falling for it hook, line, and sinker.”