Steve Weisman is a lawyer, college professor, author, and one of the country’s leading experts in cybersecurity, identity theft, and scams. See Steve’s other Con Watch articles.
For many people, the promise of a job that’s easy, pays well, doesn’t require any skill, and can be done from home sounds pretty good, which may explain why people are vulnerable to job scams.
One popular scam offers to pay you to be a product tester for Amazon.
Ads soliciting people to become Amazon product testers are found on social media such as Facebook and TikTok. You are told that the job entails testing and writing reviews of products sent to you for free by Amazon. Not only will you be paid for your services, but you even get to keep the products you test. Some of these ads promise payments of as much as $1,500 per month.
What makes the scam a bit more believable is that Amazon actually does have a product testing program called Amazon Vine, where people review products that are sent to them for free, but the program is by invitation only, and it does not pay anything.
The scammers use social media and fake websites with easily counterfeited Amazon logos to trick people into applying for these phony jobs. They will use legitimate appearing domains such as amazonproducttesting.com or amazonproducttestingjobs.com.
The phony job offerings are also posted on legitimate job sites such as LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter and Monster. Legitimate job sites try to police their sites to keep such scams from appearing, but even when they do manage to identify and take down such scams, they reappear like a game of whack-a-mole.
Some of the scams ask for payments of $50 to sign up for the program. Even if you’re not asked for an application fee, you still end up providing sensitive personal information such as your Social Security number, which can then be used to steal your identity.
This is an easy scam to avoid simply by understanding that Amazon does not pay anyone to test their products, and their non-paid product review program is by invitation only. Anyone else promoting an Amazon testing and review program is a fraud.
Another type of job scam takes advantage of the reputation of legitimate professional networking sites. LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network and as such, has long been attractive to scammers seeking to piggy-back on the site’s good reputation. Recently, the number of job scams on LinkedIn has increased dramatically.
One recent development is scammers using the name of legitimate companies to approach their victims through LinkedIn’s direct messaging feature. They then ask the job seekers to provide personal information on a legitimate-looking (but counterfeit) website as part of the hiring process before holding a video job interview.
They may use the personal information you provided for purposes of identity theft. They also may ask for money or your credit card number to pay for background investigations or equipment for the company, which legitimate businesses do not do. In other instances, the job seeker is required to pay for equipment or training, which the scammer promises to reimburse, but of course the money is never paid back. Making the problem even worse is the use of AI to make the phony websites appear more like the real ones.
When it comes to job scams, it can be very difficult to distinguish legitimate offers from scams. Check out the website of the company supposedly offering you a job to see if the job is even listed. Make sure you are using a domain name that you have confirmed is credible and not just the one contained in an email sent to you by the scammer or an advertisement. If the job doesn’t appear on the real company’s website, it is likely a scam. It also is a good idea to confirm any job offer you might receive with the HR department of the real company before providing personal information such as your Social Security number.
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