The most reliable way to check if a job is legit is to open the company’s official website yourself and confirm the position is posted on their own careers page. If it isn’t listed there, you are almost certainly dealing with someone impersonating the company. Job scam losses reached $286 million in 2023, and the first half of 2024 alone topped $220 million, pushed higher by a new wave of “task scams” that trick people into paying money while they think they’re earning it.1Federal Trade Commission. Paying to Get Paid: Gamified Job Scams Drive Record Losses A casual glance won’t protect you anymore. The checks below are ordered by how much fraud they catch for how little effort.
Start on the Company’s Own Careers Page
Type the company name into a search engine yourself. Do not use a link a recruiter sent you. Navigate to the official site and find the open roles. If the position you were contacted about doesn’t appear there, treat the outreach as fraudulent. Scammers can post fake listings on job boards and social platforms, but they cannot add jobs to a real company’s website.
While you’re there, note how applications are actually accepted. Most mid-size and large employers use an applicant tracking system with a structured online form. Even when a legitimate job is discovered on a third-party board, applying usually routes you back to the company’s own portal. A “recruiter” who insists you skip that process and send documents to a personal email is not working through official channels.
Check the Domain and the Recruiter’s Email
Scammers register domains that look almost identical to a real company’s URL, a technique called typosquatting. They swap a lowercase “l” for the number “1,” add a letter, or use a different extension like .net instead of .com. Those differences are easy to miss in an email. Compare the URL character by character against the address you found through your own search.
A WHOIS lookup shows when a domain was registered and by whom. If a site claims to represent a company founded twenty years ago but the domain was created three weeks ago, that mismatch is a strong indicator of fraud. ICANN’s WHOIS portal and several other free tools will run the check.
Recruiter email addresses deserve the same treatment. The domain after the @ should match the company’s official website exactly. Corporate HR departments at established employers do not send hiring correspondence from Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook accounts. A message from “recruiting@company-careers.com” when the real company operates at “company.com” is a fabricated address, no matter how polished the rest of the email looks.
Cross-Reference the Recruiter on LinkedIn
LinkedIn offers verification badges that confirm a user’s identity, workplace, or educational institution.2LinkedIn Help. Verifications on Your LinkedIn Profile Check whether the recruiter’s profile carries one and whether their employment history at the company is plausible. Profiles created recently, with few connections, no post history, and a generic headshot, are common fronts for scam operations.
Look for the recruiter on the company’s own LinkedIn page or team directory. Real recruiters generally have colleagues at the same company also on LinkedIn, mutual connections in the industry, and activity going back months or years. A profile that exists in isolation, connected to nobody at the company it claims to represent, is worth doubting.
Confirm the Company Legally Exists
Legitimate businesses are registered at the state level. Every state’s Secretary of State (or equivalent agency) keeps a free, searchable database of registered entities, showing when a company was formed, whether it’s in good standing, and who serves as its registered agent. A company that claims hundreds of employees but doesn’t appear in any state’s business registry likely isn’t a legal entity at all.
A company headquartered in one state may operate in others under a foreign entity registration, so the absence of a filing in your state alone doesn’t prove fraud. Search the state where the company says it’s headquartered. Look at whether the registered agent is a real person or a recognized registered-agent service, rather than a name that turns up nowhere online.
Physical addresses add another layer. Satellite imagery tools let you see whether an address matches a commercial building or a residential home, and building directories often list tenants. A company claiming 200 employees with an address at an apartment or a UPS Store mailbox is not what it appears to be. Some legitimate small businesses and startups do operate remotely, so a virtual office by itself isn’t proof. It’s the combination of signals that matters.
Watch How They Want to Interview You
The platform a “recruiter” uses says a lot. Professional hiring teams use corporate email, established video conferencing tools, and scheduled interviews. Scammers gravitate to Telegram, WhatsApp, and similar apps because they can disappear from those platforms without a trace. If someone claiming to represent a Fortune 500 company wants to conduct the entire interview over Telegram chat, that’s a serious red flag.
Speed is another giveaway. Real hiring involves multiple conversations, often with different people, over days or weeks. An offer extended after one short text exchange, with no video call, no discussion of your qualifications, and no reference check, is almost certainly fraudulent. Legitimate employers invest time vetting candidates. A scammer’s incentive runs the other way: the faster they close, the less time you have to think.
Deepfake Interviews
A newer threat is real-time AI-generated video used to impersonate someone during an interview. The technology has improved, but it still leaves artifacts. Watch for lip movements slightly out of sync with audio, unnatural eye movement, and blurry or distorted facial edges. Clothing that doesn’t move naturally when the person shifts is another tell.
If something feels off, ask the person to briefly turn off their virtual background. Deepfake software struggles when the background changes abruptly. You can also ask them to turn their head to the side or hold a hand near their face. Those simple requests create rendering problems for current tools. Interview deepfake fraud has become common enough that major employers now train their own recruiting teams to detect it.
Never Pay to Get Hired, and Guard Your SSN
A legitimate employer will never ask you to pay money to get a job.3Federal Trade Commission. But the Hire Is Not So Delightful Not for training materials, not for a background check, not for certification, not for equipment. Anyone who asks you to spend your own money as a condition of being hired is running a scam, no matter how they frame it. The FTC is direct on this: if you have to pay to get hired, walk away.4Federal Trade Commission. Job Scams
Scammers who demand payment tend to insist on methods that can’t be reversed: gift cards, wire transfers, cryptocurrency, and payment apps. Once the money is sent, there is no chargeback and no way to trace the recipient.5Federal Trade Commission. Did Someone Insist You Pay Them With Cryptocurrency? A company that can’t accept a standard corporate payment method for a supposed business expense is not a company.
Your Social Security number, bank account details, and copies of ID should only be provided after you have accepted a formal written offer and are completing onboarding paperwork. Legitimate employers collect that information through secure portals for two specific purposes: setting up tax withholding on Form W-4 and verifying employment eligibility on Form I-9.6Internal Revenue Service. Hiring Employees Any request for your SSN during the application or interview stage, before a real offer exists, is a red flag for identity theft. When an employer runs a background check through a third-party service, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires your written consent first, with proper disclosures.7Federal Trade Commission. Using Consumer Reports: What Employers Need to Know A scammer who says they “just need your SSN to run a quick check” is harvesting your information.
The Fake Check Scheme
One common variant involves a fraudulent check. The new “employer” mails you a check, tells you to deposit it, and instructs you to wire part of the funds to a supposed vendor for equipment or supplies. The check appears to clear because banks are required to make funds available within a set time frame, but availability doesn’t mean the check is real. When the bank later discovers it’s counterfeit, it reverses the deposit and you are personally liable for the full amount you spent or wired. No honest employer will send you a check and tell you to send part of the money somewhere else.4Federal Trade Commission. Job Scams
Recognize Task Scams
The fastest-growing job scam doesn’t look like traditional employment fraud. Task scams, also called gamified job scams, recruit people to do simple repetitive online tasks such as rating product images or liking videos. The “job” runs in an app or web platform that shows commissions climbing with every click. Tasks come in sets, and the system promises bigger payouts as you level up. Some victims receive small real payments early on, which builds trust.1Federal Trade Commission. Paying to Get Paid: Gamified Job Scams Drive Record Losses
Then the trap closes. At some point the platform tells you to deposit money to “charge up” your account before you can complete the next set of tasks or withdraw your earnings. The balance the app displays is fictional. No matter what the screen shows, that money doesn’t exist, and once you deposit real funds, you won’t get them back. Reports of these scams quadrupled between 2023 and early 2024.1Federal Trade Commission. Paying to Get Paid: Gamified Job Scams Drive Record Losses
Task scams usually arrive as unsolicited messages on WhatsApp, Telegram, or text, often from someone claiming to represent a well-known company. The pitch promises easy money for minimal effort, which loops back to the most reliable red flag in job fraud: if the pay seems too good for the work described, it is.
If You’ve Already Been Scammed
If you shared personal information or lost money, move quickly. Place a fraud alert with one of the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion); that bureau is required to notify the other two. An initial fraud alert lasts at least one year and requires creditors to take extra steps before opening new accounts. For stronger protection, request a security freeze, which blocks new credit accounts entirely until you lift it. Federal law requires all three bureaus to place and remove freezes at no charge, within one business day for electronic or phone requests.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 US Code 1681c-1 – Identity Theft Prevention; Fraud Alerts and Active Duty Alerts
Visit IdentityTheft.gov to create an official Identity Theft Report and get a personalized recovery plan covering disputes, creditor contacts, and document replacement. If you’re worried someone may use your SSN for employment, set up an E-Verify self-lock at E-Verify.gov to block your number from being used to verify work eligibility for someone else.9Federal Trade Commission. What To Do Right Away
File a report with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Those reports feed a database law enforcement uses to identify scam operations.4Federal Trade Commission. Job Scams If you lost money through an internet-based scheme, also file at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, ic3.gov. Include your contact information, details about the person or entity that scammed you, financial transaction records, and any correspondence.10Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Frequently Asked Questions Preserve everything: emails, texts, screenshots of the posting, receipts, check images. Do not delete conversations or throw away documents. Investigators need them.
Money lost to a job scam may be deductible as a theft loss on your federal return. The loss must arise from conduct that constitutes theft under your state’s law, you must have no reasonable prospect of recovery, and the loss must have arisen from a transaction entered into for profit, which job scam losses generally meet because you were seeking employment income.11Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 4684 – Casualties and Thefts You claim the deduction in the year you discover the loss, using Form 4684. Keep thorough documentation, including the original posting, all communications, bank statements, and any reports you filed. A tax professional can confirm whether your situation qualifies and how to report it.