Job scams on trusted sites like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter are preying on workers' desperation

Innovative scammers are posting jobs that are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate listings, including on trusted websites like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter.

At first, the job seekers didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. One spotted a post on ZipRecruiter for a position at J.P. Morgan, another submitted an application on LinkedIn for a vice president of marketing role at a tech startup, and a third got an email from a recruiter about a high-level position at an outdoor clothing company.

But there were no employers on the other end. Instead, these listings were driven by increasingly innovative scammers using complex schemes to lure job seekers into a range of financial traps as a growing number of Americans struggle to find work.

It’s a new wave of scams that goes beyond the poorly worded text messages that took off during the pandemic, offering remote work for pay that seemed too good to be true. Now, scammers are posting jobs nearly indistinguishable from legitimate listings, some appearing on trusted websites, like LinkedIn or ZipRecruiter, or coming from spoofed or hacked email addresses of recruiters, according to interviews with more than 20 job seekers, cybersecurity experts and executives of hiring websites. That’s left even highly educated and tech-savvy job hunters at risk.

Scam job postings on the rise as millions of Americans search for work04:07“These fakes look so real and so legitimate, it’s almost impossible for would-be job seekers to tell the difference,” said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps identity theft victims.

Often, the end goal of a phony job posting is to lure applicants into handing over sensitive personal information, like a Social Security number for employment verification or a bank account for direct deposit. Other schemes try to entice victims to click on a link, such as for a Zoom interview, and then install malicious software.