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Following a year of rising layoffs, particularly in the tech industry, scammers have turned to luring victims with fake employment offers.
According to a report by ZeroFox Intelligence, fake job postings have increased by 30 per cent between the third and fourth quarters of 2022, and the dollar cost of such scams has nearly doubled.
The scams are relatively simple, relying less on cleverness and more on the desperation of people newly unemployed and looking for their next paycheck. Scammers are using a range of methods, from using fake employment applications to impersonating real organisations.
Using these methods, scammers can get a range of personal information for other uses, including bank account details.
As well as rising layoffs, the move to more remote working options has also fuelled the rise in job scams.
Scammers are also targeting individuals looking to make a career change, as well as individuals in high-paying industries, such as tech, banking, and primary industries like oil and gas. Recent graduates looking for employment are also solid targets, and scammers are even promising to forgive student debts if a victim takes up a fake job offer.
“In addition to these employment scams causing reputational damage to the impersonated organisations and disappointing the victim job seekers,” ZeroFox researchers said in their report, “the Federal Trade Commission reports that they have also been costing these victims significantly more overall in lost funds.”
Job scams have cost Americans alone hundreds of millions of dollars in 2022, and that number seems to be rising even into 2023.
“The current economic and employment environment enables threat actors to take advantage of job seekers who may be desperately looking for work — and therefore may not be as diligent about spotting red flags that indicate a job posting is fraudulent,” ZeroFox said.
And speaking of those red flags, here are some of the things people should look out for to avoid getting scammed.
As if unemployment wasn’t already bad enough…
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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