Shocking Reality: Fake Recruiters Preying on Unsuspecting Job Seekers!

Mia* became suspicious when she was asked basic questions during a Zoom interview for a job in human resources. Her doubts were confirmed when her prospective employer demanded that she pay £275 upfront for recruiting training. Suspecting that she was fraudulent, she backed out.

“When you think of scamming, you might think of a pickpocket or, online, someone sending you a bad link. It is not something so elaborate and not in the employment market,” he said. “I’m glad I was suspicious from the start.”

Mia first encountered scammers after moving to London from Australia. She applied for and was unable to get a job as a human resources administrator with a business entity such as Inglemoss Consultants, advertised on the Indeed job site. A week later, she was contacted and told that she had been shortlisted for a different HR position.

She was right to be cautious. Three other people told the Financial Times that they had been swindled by Inglemoss Consultants. One, Jamie Glover, a 23-year-old University of Sussex graduate, said he took up a role with the organization last year and paid for the £275 training package. After a day of training, he was given the task of recruiting more candidates. But he found little work and it was never paid.

“It felt like a pure pyramid scheme, there was no other function,” he said.

On the Glassdoor recruiting website, seven anonymous reviewers said representatives of Inglemoss Consultants had lied about the nature of a job, did not pay staff and did not return phone calls or emails. Indeed said it had removed the organization’s account in November 2022 after an investigation of fraud and complaints from job applicants.

“Inglemoss Consultants” is not listed on Companies House, messages sent to email addresses listed on its website have been recovered, and the company, including one of the scam victim’s managers, did not respond to phone calls.

Recruitment experts said scammers had been helped by many online recruitment processes during the Covid-19 pandemic and that their sophisticated schemes were becoming more familiar to job seekers.

“We are seeing a frightening amount of this on a daily basis,” said Steve Sully, regional director for UK recruiter Robert Half. “We regularly see candidates sending WhatsApp messages that they receive from people claiming to be consultants for [us].” With so much remote work, it’s “much easier for scammers to take advantage of the vulnerable.”

Job-related fraud is more than a time-consuming hassle for job seekers and businesses. Victims can be tricked out of money and personal data, while companies can suffer considerable reputational damage.

In February, LinkedIn acknowledged an increase in the number and sophistication of scams on your platform. The trend extends to a variety of job sites, recruiting companies, and other businesses.

Figures from the US Federal Trade Commission show that there were more than 92,000 business and work-related scams in 2022, with $367 million lost, up considerably from $209 million the previous year.

JobsAware, a UK non-profit organization that Mia reported to Inglemoss Consultants, collects complaints of job scams and unfair labor practices and provides advice to workers. Its president, Keith Rosser, said more people were “looking for additional work due to the cost of living crisis. This is putting a lot of people in the job market and leaving them exposed.”

Ben King, head of customer trust at Okta, the digital identity specialist, said the threat was intensifying. “Wait [fake job scams] to augment only with access to online generative AI [and] Logic learning machine tools, which make fake job ads and emails more realistic from criminals, targeting specific victim demographics.”

Fraud attacks are already becoming more elaborate, as scammers often create fake websites, conduct interviews via Skype, and in some cases display impressive mastery of the industry they claim to work in.

Jonathan Waterman-Smith, a recruiting consultant at TRG Recruitment, said his experience showed how scammers approached targets with greater sophistication, using industry-specific terminology that demonstrated a high degree of vetting.

He was approached on LinkedIn by a person posing as a “talent acquisition team leader” at a manufacturing company who wanted help hiring workers.

Waterman-Smith spoke to the scammer over the phone and explained how he worked and the fees involved. Initially, he was convinced that the person he was calling was genuine.

“He wasn’t a rookie,” Waterman-Smith said. “This guy knew the terminology we use in the recruiting industry. He either had a lot of experience doing this or he knew the hiring lingo and had possibly been in the industry in the past.”

Recruiters like Waterman-Smith often identify potential candidates for clients. When this supposed client suggested three potential candidates to interview, he realized something strange was going on.

He called the company in question and was told they had no record of the person having been an employee. If the scam had gone as planned, Waterman-Smith hoped his company would have paid the claimants, and the scammer’s alleged associates, and billed the scammer, only to have the bill go unpaid.

“I was very lucky,” Waterman-Smith said. I got away relatively unpunished, apart from wasting half an hour talking to this guy.

Scammers prey on those they have identified as vulnerable, such as people who have recently lost their jobs or those who are unfamiliar with employment practices. “She could be considered an easy target,” Mia said. “They could definitely target [workers] because they are not as aware of UK employment laws and the rules here.”

In December, Alex Ellis, the British High Commissioner to India, warned scammers used his name to persuade people to hand over information and money to obtain UK work visas.

For Mohammed Yasar Farath, a technician living in Hyderabad, southern India, a link through a job posting site on Instagram led him to an alleged offer from a UK energy company. One drawback: he would have to pay £500 for a visa application. After refusing to hand over the money, the “so-called lawyer . . . He was very irritated.” Farath realized that the job offer did not exist and that the visa was a scam. He walked away and considers himself “very lucky.”

Scammers are not just a risk to candidates, Sully said, but also to the reputations of recruiters and employers who “use [a] brand as a facade.” Many companies include tips on how to avoid scams on their websites and social media channels.

Last summer, Amanda Chilcott, global head of human resources for Neptune Energy, was alerted to a “significant increase in scammers” posing as their employer when potential victims called the front desk about fraudulent emails. The company hired a cyber security group to block unauthorized domains using its name.

This is more difficult for smaller companies, King said, which “lack the resources to effectively monitor and control this threat.”

While evolving AI tools may make scams more ubiquitous and credible, they will also prove to be “a valuable tool for organizations to monitor and control content at a speed that no human review can match,” King added. “Significant research is underway to detect machine-generated content in large data sets, and simply having a post or job ad flagged as “suspicious” can save many from falling victim in the first place or encourage them to investigate further. thoroughly before proceeding with a job application. .”

Employers are also vulnerable to dishonest applicants. Satish Kumar, chief executive of Glider AI, a technology platform that provides virtual assessments and video interviews for recruiters that detects suspicious activity, said the rise in remote hiring had led to a rise in candidate fraud, by example, when receiving responses from friends.

Once a candidate has gone through the hiring process, it can take at least a month to find out that they are not fit for the job. Rehiring is expensive. “The company loses a lot of time and has to restart the process,” Kumar said.

For individuals, fraud can leave scars. Fatima, who filed a lawsuit against Inglemoss Consultants in an employment tribunal to which the organization did not respond, said: “It caused me a lot of anxiety. They were playing vulnerable people and it was hard to know it was a scam until you were already in it.”

*Some names have been changed