It’s scam season again.
Or did it ever leave?
Normally come spring, we’d issue a warning about CRA (Canada Revenue Agency, aka the Tax Guys) scams. This is about the point where people are filing taxes and getting their refunds, so scams are rife with people getting so-called text messages about their return, clicking on the links, and giving up private information. This is a pretty bad scam, so quickly: the CRA never sends you texts regarding your returns and they already have your personal information, so they don’t usually need it again (unless you’re talking to agents in person on the phone who you have contacted independently of any links. And even then, they may not need much from you).
But we’re not talking about the CRA today. We’re talking about a newer and vicious scam that has been making the rounds again: Job Post Scams.
What Is a Job Post Scam?
It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a job post that is actually a scam of some sort, often phishing.
How do they come about? Well, the job board websites pretty much let anyone post jobs as long as they have some sort of an account. There’s no real verification that the business is legitimate and anyone can post anything. While the truly junky jobs ultimately get filtered out simply because everyone avoids them, scammers, in conjunction with tools like AI writing tools, can churn out all kinds of job posts with all different keywords, to help ensure that their fake posts rise to the top.
There are several types of job post scams, some of which have been around for a long time. These include:
- Fake job posts that look to get peoples’ personal information and may ask you to pay for ‘services’ to help you rise to the fake top
- Fake interviews where the scammers direct you to a site they control and can easily scoop your personal information
- Fake recruiters that get you to pay for their services promising to help you find work
- Pay to Work scams where you have to pay before doing any work (And then the work never happens)
Avoiding the Scam
So how can you avoid being scammed out of your money and time?
Well, the same rules that apply to dodging the CRA scam applies to the job scam: Independently verify the post.
We received a call last week from a job seeker who said he had an interview with one of our members of staff and the whole thing felt off to him. We told him that we had never interviewed him (And that furthermore, we weren’t hiring anyway) and he thanked us. This is what alerted us to the fact that someone (or several someones) is using our name and our staff to post fake jobs and conduct fake interviews to try to get personal information out of job seekers.
And while finding this out made everyone insulted and livid, it was far better that we knew it was happening and can take steps to try to prevent others from being fooled. Which leads me to the Best Way to Avoid Being Scammed: Independently Verify.
Job boards are, for better or worse, the first place most people look when they are searching for jobs. So what we are going to do is add an extra half step to your research. If you find a job post that you like the looks of, independently contact the business and find out if the job post is legitimate before you apply. What I mean by this: Find out the business’ contact information independently of the job post (look for the website, check the phone book, look them up on Better Business Bureau) and then contact that business and simply ask if the job post is legitimate.
Here’s a simple script:
Hi, my name is _______. I am contacting you about the job post I found on Indeed/Monster/LinkedIn, etc. for (Job role) and I just wanted to make sure it was legitimate before I apply.
Done! Either the job post is legitimate in which case they’ll say yes and you’ll have made an early contact which might help you with rising to the top for interviews; or, if the job post isn’t legitimate, the business will be glad you warned them that someone is out there using their name to get information. Either way, it’s a win, and it takes only a minute or two.
Other Tips
If you aren’t sure whether a job offer or post is legitimate or not, a couple other steps you can take:
- Don’t click on any links from an email that you didn’t expect was coming. For example, if you get a job offer for a job you didn’t apply for, don’t click on any links. Independently verify. (or ignore completely).
- If a job looks too good to be true, odds are that it is. Sadly.
- Don’t use remote interview software you don’t recognize. Teams, Slack, or Zoom are the big ones; anything you don’t don’t recognize probably isn’t worth the risk that you might be giving away information.
- You never have to pay a business to interview you. That’s not how this works! And on a related note, you should never have to work for free in order to secure a job. (This is more for freelancers, but still)
In short: Independently verify that the job post is legitimate before applying, remember that companies shouldn’t be asking you for personal information until you are actually hired with a real Letter of Employment in your hands, and you should never pay to be interviewed.
And we here at Canadian Vocational Training Centre are not hiring at current, and we never reach out to people with a Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, etc. address. So if you see a job post claiming to be from us, reach out to us independently and let us know!
