Is That Job Offer Real or a Scam?

With the growth of the freelance workforce outpacing employment growth in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, more and more people are spending a significant portion of their working hours looking for their next paying project. Always being on the lookout for a new gig can make some people more driven to succeed, but it can create a sense of desperation in others. Scammers have seized upon this opportunity to create imposter scams and career opportunity scams, and with technological advances their scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), imposter scams occur when a person pretends to be someone the target trusts, such as a relative or friend. In these scams, the scammer might also pretend to be someone trying to help you (e.g., a computer technician or a government employee) or indicate that they are associated with a specific organization, such as a charity or company. Scams including business and employment opportunities can also be classified as career opportunity scams.

For freelancers looking for their next gig, they are most likely to run into scammers pretending to be a human resource representative looking to fill a position. Lee Goldberg detailed an example of an imposter scam involving a “company representative” in his recent article for Ars Technica.

Far too often people respond to stories about scams with disbelief — disbelief that people are so nefarious, disbelief that the scams actually work, and disbelief that someone fell for the scams. One in five people fell for imposter scams in the US in 2018, losing $488 million in the process (FTC, 2019). Before shaming someone for becoming a scammer’s next target, it’s important to understand that running a con is a sophisticated operation (even when it seems like an “obvious” scam).

How Scammers Earn a Person’s Trust

The art of the con is built on a fairly scientific prototype based on deeply rooted human reactions. A typical imposter scam can be broken down into three general phases: establishing authority, building legitimacy, and creating immediacy while reciprocating trust.

Establishing Authority

In an imposter scam, the scammer’s first step is to establish authority for the target. For freelancers, this can come in the form of a human resource representative or potential client. Today’s scammers have harnessed the power of the internet to make their scams look as legitimate as possible.

Scammers may reach out to you with an introduction or offer that looks genuine. They will often lift real job announcements from a company’s website or employment ad, then tweak it for their own use. They use names and titles listed on the real company’s website. If the offer looks real, it may in fact be authentic. But that doesn’t mean the person reaching out to you really is who they say they are.

By using a real and known (or easily verified) company, scammers can instantly position themselves as an authority figure. When they reach out to a freelancer whose information they acquired from a legitimate jobsite, it adds to their authority. Society has trained us to respond to people with perceived authority, so the first phase in the scam is complete.

Building Legitimacy

In the next part of the scam, the con artist continues to establish authority while also putting the target at ease. The scammer may lead you through an expected process. For example, if you are looking for a work project or freelancing gig, the “company rep” who reached out to you in the first phase can request an interview.

Interviews are a typical onboarding process in any company, and with more companies maximizing technology to streamline the process while minimizing costs, the idea of conducting an interview via online tools (e.g., chats) really isn’t that far-fetched. As a freelancer, you likely want to show that you’re comfortable with technology in various forms, and an interview via video conferencing or chat rooms gives you the chance to do just that.

By building legitimacy, the scammer is putting you at ease. You might wonder about certain questions that are asked during the interview, but the bulk of the questions are exactly what you’d expect during a traditional interview process. In this way, legitimacy is established. We trust what we feel comfortable with.

After the interview, successful candidates are hired, which means the “company” now needs all sorts of information from its newest freelancer. The scammers ask for not only your full legal name and place of residence, but also your tax-related information (e.g., social security number) and perhaps your banking information so they can deposit your payments. You might be asked to submit this information as part of a background check.

At this point, they have what they need to impersonate you to your bank and other financial institutions. They can open new accounts in your name, run up the charges, and leave you with the bill. But before they do so, they want to make sure they can clean out your banking account.

Creating Immediacy while Reciprocating Trust

The final phase of the scam can take numerous forms. The scammer might ask you to update your computer systems, purchase new software, or hire a team of subcontractors — all on the company’s dime, of course. The scammer sends you a check and asks you to deposit it immediately so you can get started on this new project. They’re excited to have you working for them and want to see what you can do for them as soon as possible.

Two issues come into play here. The first is the sense of immediacy. By creating urgency in the situation, the scammer is pushing you to overlook any red flags that might have appeared during the first two phases of the con and act on your emotions — especially your excitement about being hired and getting a really good paycheck for the project.

In urgent situations, humans tend to make rash decisions. It’s a dangerous combination, and scammers use it to their advantage.

The second issue involves the act of reciprocating trust. By sending you a payment before you do the work, the scammers are indicating to you that they trust you. When we feel trusted, even by strangers, our brains release the neurochemical oxytocin, which induces a desire to reciprocate that trust.

Ultimately, the con artist puts you in the driver’s seat. Suddenly you’re not feeling vulnerable because you’re worried about your next paycheck. You’re feeling trusted and empowered. Now add in that sense of urgency, and you might find yourself making decisions that result in a depleted bank account.

Even if your bank accepts the check and you wait ten days for it to “clear,” you can still find yourself in trouble. Weeks later your bank will inform you that the check was fake, and now you are on the hook for the entire amount, which the bank will likely remove from any and all of your accounts immediately.

Don’t forget that in the second stage of the con, you provided enough information for the scammers to steal your identity, so by the time you realize you’ve been taken, you might have credit card companies banging down your door, demanding payment for lines of credit that you never opened.

Protecting Yourself

Scamming is a sophisticated business. It’s all too easy for us to analyze a con after the fact, pointing out red flags when we already know to be looking for them. It can be much harder to recognize a scam when you are in the middle of being conned. Yet you can take steps to minimize the chances of falling for a scam.

Study the Initial Message

When you receive any communication offering work, make sure you review all the pieces. If the sender is representing a company, does their email address indicate this? If their email address comes from a free webmail service, this is a red flag. Proceed with caution.

In addition, reach out to the company directly using the information on their website or in public sources, not the information from the communication you received. Call the human resource department and ask if they are currently hiring freelancers, if they are using the website you were contacted on, and if the person who sent the original message actually works for them.

If everything is legitimate, you are proving to the hiring company that you do your due diligence and can be trusted to do the same as their employee. If it’s not legitimate, you just saved yourself from getting scammed. It’s a win–win scenario.

Verify the Payment

If your initial verification efforts didn’t turn up any red flags, but the contact person has sent you a check for a large sum of money, do your best to verify that the check is authentic. If anything looks out of place, ask questions.

For example, if the company you are interviewing with is located in New York but you receive a check from California, run an internet search for the address listed on the check. If you’re being approached by a publishing company but the address on the check is for a roofing company, reach out to all parties involved and let them know about the scam.

Take a Step Back

If you have done your due diligence and everything seems to be on the up and up, but you still have even the slightest hint of a red flag, take a step back. Tell the recruiter that you need 48 hours to consider the offer.

Asking for a reasonable amount of time to consider the offer is an acceptable practice when looking for work. If the person on the other end of the line insists that you act immediately — whether for your benefit or theirs — walk away. Even if it is a legitimate job lead, it’s probably not a project you will want if the person hiring you is so demanding as to insist that you put your entire life on hold to do the work now.

A Final Word: Typos and grammar mistakes

Many people say they can spot a scammer a mile away based on all the typos, misspellings, and grammar mistakes in the messages they send out. In the age of Grammarly et al., why would any scammer include such obvious mistakes in their messages? Is it because they simply don’t know better (e.g., they are non-native speakers)?

Actually, there are several possible answers, and they suggest that scammers know exactly what they’re doing. They could very well be using poor writing skills intentionally.

Some people argue that the poor writing skills are a way to weed out “false positives” — namely, people who would never pass through all three stages of the scam. The argument here is that the recipients are too intelligent and would walk away as soon as a single red flag is raised, so the scammers are trying to save their time by getting these “non-scammable” people to opt out on their own.

Other people suggest that using misspellings and poor grammar/syntax is a way to bypass spam filters. You can’t scam someone if your message never reaches them.

Still others argue that well-placed misspellings and typos humanize the sender of the message, which relaxes the recipient. In other words, it may be an authority figure reaching out to you, but it’s someone who is down-to-earth and with whom you can create an immediate bond.

In the end, we simply do not know enough about the art of scamming because so few people report scams. The FTC estimates as little as 15% of people who fall for scams ever report the information to the police or FBI.

Part of the problem may be because these institutions have no real way of going after a scammer in another state or even country. But the larger issue is that society tends to shame people who fall victim to scammers, which makes people reluctant to admit that they were scammed.

Scammers are not people who just luck into money. They use sophisticated methods to identify their targets and woo them into action, playing on deeply ingrained human emotions. Take the steps necessary to ensure that you are not their next victim.