Job scams are just one tool in a con artist’s arsenal, and as the local socio-economic environment changes, so will the lures for con artists. If the job market worsens, scams of this type will most likely disappear.

Fraudsters are constantly looking for weak spots in the social fabric to abuse people’s trust. in systems or structures, posing as bank workers, e-commerce platforms or even government agencies.

Using this veneer of legitimacy, scammers coerce victims into dropping some money. Faced with mounting pressure and the perceived risk of not moving forward, victims succumb to these false employment narratives.

These are the main tools that scammers use on the internet to make you believe that their job offer is real and that you should send them sensitive and personal information.

This is how they deceive us with false job offers:

You are asked to share personal financial data during an initial telephone screening

when you get one job offer official (and you are willing to accept it), you will have to fill out a form that will usually ask you to provide personal financial information, such as your Social Security number.

You will also have to provide the company with your bank account information so that the payroll can be automatically entered into your checking account.

But none of this data is necessary during the first telephone interview. At that point, the person on the other end of the line should simply examine her qualifications and gauge her interest in the position in question. So if they ask you for more information, run away.

In the same way, it is very rare that you are offered a job over the phone after a call of just 30 minutes. So assume you’re being scammed if the person you’re talking to says: “Great, when can you start and can you give me your bank account details so we can set up the payments?”.

The interviewer does not tell you the name of the company

Some job postings intentionally do not include the company name. For starters, it’s a questionable practice. But if you’re asked to do a phone screening and your interviewer won’t tell you the name of the company you’re applying to, that’s a sign there’s no real job out there.

The only way that you are in front of a real job, even though they do not tell you the name of the company, is if they are calling you from a headhunting agency, where clients looking for new workers They do not want to say the name of the company, for security and privacy reasons.

The ad itself doesn’t look professional.

Not everyone is a grammar genius. And if you’re applying for a job in IT or accounting, it’s conceivable that the hiring manager who wrote the ad doesn’t have the best writing skills.

But yesIf you see a job posting that’s full of mistakes and doesn’t even seem to make sense, it’s most likely fake. and that you do not want to request it. Also, although not everyone knows how to write well, there is a spell checker.

And if the ad you’re looking at hasn’t undergone this review, consider it a red flag. Today, there are many legitimate job offers on the table. But it’s important to recognize situations in which you may have fallen for a scammer.

Any time you give out information like your Social Security number and bank account number to the wrong person, you risk identity theft. That’s why it’s important to be vigilant when applying for a job, given the number of scammers out there.

Poorly worded job postings and correspondence

You’ve seen it before: You get an email, and the wording is just…wrong. It may be too formal and awkward, or it may be full of grammar and punctuation errors.

Professional companies do not allow it. A job ad should be easy to read and understand, and that doesn’t mean there can’t be a typo or two.. Think of it this way: if a job ad is unprofessional and clunky, what would it be like to work for that company?

Inaccurate job description

The hours are good and the pay seems great, but what exactly would you do? The job description should not be difficult to understand.

If you can’t figure out what you would do in a particular job based on the description, assume you don’t want to know. It is likely a scam.

suspicious url

While you educate yourself, take a look at the website of the company that appears in the job offer or that the recruiter has given you. First, check the URL: is the company name spelled correctly?

Most businesses want their website URL to be short and simple as that helps Google identify their page easily, so a long confusing URL can be a bad sign. You’ll also want to check the country code, if it exists. If the URL is clearly from another country, weigh it against what you already know about the job offer..

The recruiter has a generic email

Whether your correspondence is with a recruiter from a recruiting agency or with the head of Human Resources at the recruiting company, it is expect you to have a company email address.

If the recruiter uses a generic email service, like Gmail or Yahoo, it is either unreliable or highly unprofessional. In either case, you’d better go ahead with that job offer.