Transcription
Americans lost $630 million to employment scams last year. And that problem is getting worse. >> Hyper realistic job hoaxes making it tough to tell what's real. >> The scam pres on people finding a new job online. And it's cost one Kansas City woman nearly $5,000. >> Yeah, we're talking about thousands of dollars that people are out in just a short amount of time. You're about to hear from a victim. Fake job listings pose real dangers.
Hi, my name is Alex. I'm a labor market analyst and back in 2019, I spent over 9 months tracking over 7,000 new employment scams that were targeting young adults. I saw everything from fake jobs to money laundering schemes to even scams being committed by companies themselves like H-1B abuse and illegal internships. So today, I'm going to break down the biggest scams that are targeting job seekers so that you and your loved ones can stay safe while also revealing why scammers are starting to move away from simply stealing your money to focus instead on stealing your labor and your data.
Now, the biggest way that scammers siphon money out of job seekers is by hiring them, but with upfront costs. In other words, through fishing scams. See, what these scammers will do is say, "Congratulations. We want to hire you for this job, but first, we need you to pay $200 to take this online course, which we will reimburse you for later." The job seeker then enters their credit card information and they just got scammed out of $200, and the hiring manager is nowhere to be seen ever again. If you don't know, this type of approach is called social engineering and is where scammers pretend to be a legitimate employer so that they can trick you into giving them money or personal information. One way that they'll do this is by finding people who are actively looking for work on LinkedIn and then use data broker websites to figure out that person's phone number or email address. And oftent times they'll pull this off through a practice called email spoofing. for example, pretending to be someone at Microsoft by creating an email address called hiring manager@rnicrosoft.com so that it looks like a legitimate Microsoft email address to anyone not paying attention or even using something called lespeak where you take the word Amazon for example but make the letter O a number zero so that you can trick people who aren't paying close enough attention into thinking that it's real stuff like that. And this goes well beyond employment scams. Just last week, I had a friend whose cousin got arrested and that friend was immediately targeted by a scammer demanding bail money because it turned out that scammers were tracking police records locally and then using public social media posts to piece together who the immediate family members of those arrestes were. So that day, my friend got a call from someone pretending to be from the police department demanding $1,000 in bail money for the release of their cousin. Fortunately, they were smart and didn't do it. But you can easily see how people get scammed out of thousands of dollars through things like social engineering and spoofing in order to pull off fishing scams. So, at the end of the day, just remember that a legitimate company will never ever ask you to pay in order to apply to the job or to pay for your training and equipment. If they do, run.
But that being said, not all fake job postings are about scamming unemployed people out of money. Believe it or not, over 40% of companies admit to posting fake entry-level job openings for the sake of data mining or even stock market manipulation. And shockingly, most of this is not illegal. So, what companies will do is post a fake job opening, more commonly known as ghost listings, to public online job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed. So in the US, over half of the jobs that were advertised last year weren't actually filled. And in the UK, over one/3 were actually considered to be ghost jobs. >> And they do this in order to collect résumés for one of three different purposes. The first one being shareholder manipulation. Because if on paper a company is getting hundreds of job applications every month, then they can turn around to their investors and say, "Look, the company is clearly growing." and people want to work for us, so please keep buying more stocks. This is called securities fraud and is committed by one in every 10 public companies every year. However, another reason that they collect résumés is to simply keep tabs on what their competition is doing or to even steal proprietary secrets from their competitors by piecing together bullet points from current employees resumes, which is basically a more legal version of corporate espionage. And look, I could not care less if companies are out stealing secrets from one another. That's whatever. But ghost listings end up becoming a massive waste of job seekers time, especially if they're going through the trouble of tailoring their resume, writing a unique cover letter, and potentially even going through a technical interview. And it's my humble opinion that they should be illegal, especially because the third biggest reason for ghost listings is good old-fashioned data mining. Some HR platforms actively use resumeéumés to gather personal information about you and then sell it to scammers, political activists, advertisers, and everyone else in between. And look, so long as data mining remains legal in the United States, there's really no way to fully get around this when you're applying to jobs. But you can dramatically reduce the damage on your resume. You should never ever include your street address, the names of your relatives, or protected class information about yourself, like your age, race, religion, parental status, and so on and so forth. Not only will this help keep your data safe, but this will also protect you against things like hiring managers stalking you, which unfortunately does happen especially to young women or against having yourself be discriminated against by some random HR employee for something like what religion you are. Unless you're applying to work at a religious organization, stuff like that should have no place whatsoever on your resume. And then from there, I would also recommend using a separate email address for your personal life and for applying to jobs. And there are two big reasons for this. The first is so that you have one centralized place where all of your job application correspondence is getting sent. Okay, getting a job in 2026 is rough. And if you are applying to hundreds of different companies, then that is a lot of emails potentially crowding your inbox. And the second big reason is to ensure that you have a professional email address when you're applying to jobs. Because if you're applying as dragons slayer420@gmail.com, then that's probably going to hurt your chances of getting hired. First.ast name is going to leave you much better off again, so long as you're not including any personal information in it, like the year that you were born.
Now, speaking of email, if you would like to take control of your data and fight back against big tech, mass surveillance, and other threats to our privacy and online security, then Proton Mail is the clear choice, which is why I'm excited to say that they are sponsoring today's video. Proton Mail offers a private and secure alternative to Gmail and other datadriven email providers in big tech while still providing you with all of the productivity tools that you need. Proton Mail emails are automatically encrypted, meaning that even they can't see your messages. And since all other trackers are blocked by default, that means that your emails are not going to be scanned in order to target you with ads. Not only that, but Proton Mail makes it incredibly easy to switch from your current provider because their migration tool allows you to transfer emails, calendars, and contacts from Google or other providers with only a few clicks in less than 3 minutes. And since Proton Mail allows you to automatically sort emails into the right folders and unsubscribe from unwanted newsletters in one click, inbox management has never been easier. And best of all, you can get started today for free by going to www.proton.me/urgently firing. Again, that's proton.me/urgently firing. Thank you to the folks at Proton for sponsoring this video and for providing a secure email alternative to big tech.
Now, the next big employment scam that I see target young adults specifically are illegal internships. This is where a company and especially tech startups will try to staff an entire department or even the entire company itself with unpaid interns, making it so that the only person earning any money is the business owner themselves. Back when I worked at Utah State University, I saw this all the time. You would get these fresh MBA grads from places like BYU or Stanford who wanted to start a tech business but knew that they couldn't actually afford employees. So, they would then get the bright idea to advertise unpaid internships to USU's computer science program as a way of trying to get free programming labor. And I don't know who needs to hear this, but that is a crime. In the United States, unpaid internships are only legal if the worker themselves is the primary beneficiary of that internship. And there is a seven-step test that you have to pass, which is clearly laid out by the US Department of Labor in order to legally hire unpaid workers. Now, personally, I don't think that unpaid internships should be allowed to exist, period. More often than not, they're just a way for industries like finance and education to weed out people from workingclass backgrounds from being able to become teachers or financial adviserss. And while that might sound like a tinfoil hat take on the surface, there's actually a lot of evidence that this goes on at places like banks and schools. But I digress. Unpaid internships also serve as a way for companies to abuse international students because they are desperate to get some relevant work experience on their resume before they graduate. At the same time that they're often not legally authorized to have a real paid job in the United States. And to top it all off, unpaid internships are also a massive drain on both taxpayers and social services. If you are not paying your workers enough money in order to live in the community where they're working while expecting them to be there full-time, then you are expecting taxpayers to subsidize your business. Because people who work full-time but can't afford to live where they do end up having to use services like food stamps, section 8 housing, and other welfare programs to exist. And so regardless of where you are on the economic political spectrum, I think we can all agree that unpaid internships are bad for everyone.
Speaking of jobs that are bad for everyone, let's talk about commissiononly job scams. That's right, girl bosses, it's time to talk about pyramid schemes, affiliates, and multi-level marketing. Okay, so almost all commissiononly job scams fall into one of two different categories. Direct sales and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is technically a legal and legitimate business where you promote a company's products and then get paid a commission for it. Anytime you see a tech YouTuber sharing an Amazon link to what laptop they use, that's affiliate marketing. And anytime you see pretty 19-year-olds walking around your college campus with Red Bull backpacks on, that's also affiliate marketing. Where this becomes a scam is when the merchant, namely the person you're advertising for, ends up changing the rules after you've done your labor so that you never end up getting a payout. or if they force you to buy the product yourself before advertising it and or if the only real way to make a profit with that company is by convincing other people that you know to sell the product themselves. That in its illegal version is called a pyramid scheme because almost all of the money is getting funneled to the top to the corporation or to the very first salespeople whereas all subsequent salespeople end up making less and less money forming an economic pyramid shape. However, there is a legal version of this business model called multi-level marketing or MLMs, which most often target stay-at-home mothers in hyperreligious regions of North and South America and mostly sell things like essential oils, cosmetics, and cookware. And while these types of companies are technically legal, independent research by the Federal Trade Commission has shown that an overwhelming majority of people who participate in MLMs actually end up losing money. We're talking upwards of 99%. So, I would not personally recommend that anybody participate in them ever, but that's technically a personal opinion and should not be taken as financial advice.
These next three scams are probably the biggest employment scams that are affecting job seekers today and have grown dramatically in the 5 years since I was tracking these scams professionally, mostly as a result of AI hype and the work from home infrastructure that exploded in 2020. The first are called task scams. This is where a scammer offers you money in exchange for doing mundane tasks on a computer, oftent times under the guise of training their AI model. What they will do is they'll have you start out by clicking away at random buttons on a website and then immediately direct deposit $20 into your account or have an independent app where they show that the amount of money that you're earning is constantly increasing at which point you get hooked on easy money. However, after a short amount of time, the system locks you out and then says that you need to prove who you are by paying your own money in order to unlock the work that you were doing. And increasingly, scammers are now asking their victims to do that via cryptocurrencies, making it virtually impossible to get your money back after you've been scammed. And to make matters worse, the victims then have their information distributed onto dark web lists of people susceptible to scams, which then opens you up to even more and even more aggressive interaction from scammers in the future. All around a pretty horrible system that has managed to claim hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years alone. Fortunately though, almost all of these scams follow a pretty predictable pattern. So long as you never respond to easy work from home money, then you will probably be okay. And please, please, please, for the love of God, never interact with a company that uses WhatsApp here in the United States. WhatsApp communication in America is almost exclusively used for crypto, investment, and romance scams. And because it is so associated with fraud in this country, I would be highly skeptical of literally any employer who communicates using WhatsApp.
Now, speaking of America, H1B, immigration, and visa scams have also been getting significantly worse in this country since 2020. And even though they don't impact a majority of people watching this video, they are having a significantly negative impact on the entry-level job market and are worth understanding. Now, I'll keep this one brief because it does tend to rile people up for very different reasons depending on what they prioritize politically. Some people don't like that companies are trapping and abusing foreign workers in order to get cheap labor. Others don't like that Americans are being increasingly less represented in STEM fields as those companies prioritize H-1B labor over recruiting American graduates. And at the end of the day, both of those concerns are real and legitimate regardless of your personal feelings on immigration as a whole. On the one hand, there are a lot of scammers, especially in Texas and California, who establish shell companies in order to abuse the lottery system to bring over foreign nationals with fake college degrees in order to commit fraud or human trafficking. And on the other hand, tech companies in particular have a really bad habit of hiring foreign workers into STEM fields because they know that they can get away with paying them less money and then firing them after 2 years. In fact, just a year ago, Amazon received a ton of flak after they hired 40,000 H1B workers over the course of 5 years, followed by laying off almost that exact same amount of American workers in their corporate offices. Now granted, Amazon was not formally convicted of any wrongdoing here, and the workers that they hired did have different job duties than the ones who were laid off, but this habit of H-1B abuse in tech is starting to have an insanely negative impact on the American labor force via the destruction of entry-level jobs and by perpetuating the myth of there being a skills gap in the United States. If you weren't aware, the quote unquote skills gap that the US is facing right now straight up doesn't exist. While there are some industries that are seeing some worker shortages in some parts of the country, that gap is largely caused by companies refusing to pay adequate wages in order to recruit people from technical schools or universities in other parts of the country or by refusing to hire entry-level professionals. which makes this purely a problem of corporate laziness and is a natural consequence of companies refusing to hire or train the next generation of workers. There is not a shortage of skilled workers who are qualified to do all of the work that needs to be done here in America. There is only a shortage of companies willing to pay for that labor. which is why they perpetuate the myth of a skills gap in order to justify abusing foreign workers for lower wages. But that can and should be a whole separate video.
Because speaking of wages, good oldfashioned wage theft has also been increasing since 2020, costing American workers almost $50 billion in lost pay every single year with less than 1% of those wages ever being recovered for the victims of wage theft. And while wage theft is not an outright employment scam per se, the financial impact that it has on American workers, dwarfs everything that we just talked about by 80 times over. Being forced to work while off the clock. Not being paid time and a half for overtime after hitting 40 hours in a week. Minimum wage violations. Getting illegally classified as an independent contractor. Your manager taking a cut of your tips when you're a service worker. All of that is wage theft. And it has become an epidemic. again costing American workers tens of billions of dollars in lost wages every single year. And while I cannot and will not offer legal advice in this video, I would still highly encourage you to check your local laws and seek legal help if any of those scenarios has happened to you. But what I can advise you on is hitting that subscribe button and watching this video next in order to better understand how economic forces in the job market shape our daily lives. I will see you over there.