Employment Scam Red Flags: Fake Jobs and Work-From-Home Fraud

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Employment scams exploit job seekers by offering fake positions designed to steal personal information, extract money, or recruit unwitting participants in money laundering operations. The FTC reported over $490 million lost to employment scams in 2023, a 118 percent increase from the previous year. The rise of remote work has made these scams more plausible and harder to detect.

Common Employment Scam Types

Fake job postings appear on legitimate job boards including LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter. Scammers copy real job descriptions from actual companies, post them under the company’s name or a convincing variant, and collect personal information including SSNs, bank account numbers, and copies of IDs from applicants going through a fake “onboarding” process.

Reshipping and money mule scams offer positions as “package inspectors,” “shipping coordinators,” or “financial processing agents.” The job involves receiving packages at your home and reshipping them, or receiving money in your bank account and forwarding it (minus your “commission”) via wire transfer or cryptocurrency. You are unknowingly laundering stolen goods or money, which makes you criminally liable.

Advance-fee scams require you to pay for training materials, background checks, equipment, or software before starting the job. Legitimate employers never charge employees for the privilege of working. The 2023 uptick in “remote work equipment” scams had victims purchasing laptops through specific vendors (controlled by the scammers) with fake company credit cards that were later reversed, leaving the victim responsible for the charges.

Interview-via-chat scams conduct the entire hiring process through text messages, Telegram, or WhatsApp rather than phone calls or video interviews. The rapid, text-only process avoids the scrutiny that comes with hearing a voice or seeing a face, and it allows scammers to run multiple schemes simultaneously.

Red Flags

The salary is significantly above market rate for the role. The “interview” happens entirely via text or chat. You receive a job offer without a real interview. The company asks for your SSN, bank account, or copies of ID before you have signed an official offer letter and tax documents. You are asked to pay for anything upfront. The company email domain does not match the real company’s website. The job posting has numerous grammatical errors.

Verification Steps

Research the company independently. Visit the real company website and verify the job listing exists there. Contact the company’s official HR department to confirm the position and the recruiter’s identity.

Check the recruiter’s email domain. A recruiter from Microsoft uses @microsoft.com, not @microsoft-careers.com or @gmail.com. Domain variations are a reliable scam indicator.

Search for the job on the company’s careers page. If the position exists only on the job board and not on the company’s own website, it is likely fraudulent.

Never pay to get a job. This is the simplest universal rule. Any request for payment from a prospective employer is a scam.

For more on how scammers use identity information collected through fake job postings, see our identity theft protection guide. To understand the social engineering behind employment scams, explore our social engineering defense guide.

Protecting Your Personal Information During Job Searches

Legitimate employers follow a predictable hiring process: application, interview (often multiple rounds), offer letter, acceptance, and then onboarding paperwork. Personal information like your SSN, bank account details, and copies of identification documents should only be provided after you have accepted a verified offer and are completing official tax and payroll documentation (W-4, I-9) through established HR systems.

If you have already provided personal information to a suspected scam employer, monitor your credit reports immediately, consider placing a fraud alert or credit freeze, and file a report with the FTC and your state attorney general. The information may be used for identity theft months after collection.