Fake recruiters apply scams to job seekers – 06/14/2023 – Market

Mia* was suspicious when asked basic questions in a Zoom interview for a human resources position. Her misgivings were confirmed when the alleged prospective employer asked her to shell out £275 (£1,680) upfront for recruitment training. Suspecting it to be fraud, she withdrew.

“When you think of scams, maybe you think of pickpockets or someone sending you a broken link online. Not something that complex, and not the job market,” she said. “I’m glad I was suspicious from the start.”

Mia first encountered scammers when she moved to London from Australia. She applied for a job as an HR administrator with an organization called Inglemoss Consultants. She didn’t get the job, which was advertised on the job site Indeed. 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 FT that they were scammed by Inglemoss Consultants. One of them, Jamie Glover, 23, a graduate of the University of Sussex, said he took a job with the organization last year and paid £275 for the training package. After a day of training, he was tasked with recruiting more candidates. But he found little work and never got paid.

“It struck me as a pyramid scheme, pure and simple,” he commented. “There was no other function.”

On recruitment site Glassdoor, seven anonymous reviewers said representatives of Inglemoss Consultants lied about the nature of a vacancy, that they don’t pay their employees and don’t respond to phone calls and emails. The site said it removed the organization’s account in November last year after a fraud investigation and receiving reports from job seekers.

Inglemoss Consultants is not listed on Companies House (the British Board of Trade). Messages sent to the email addresses cited on its website bounced back, and the company, including one of the scam victims’ managers, did not return phone calls.

Recruitment experts said scammers benefited from the fact that many hiring processes began to take place online during the Covid pandemic. They also said that job seekers are becoming more aware of the sophisticated schemes used by scammers.

“We see an appalling volume of scams on a daily basis,” said Steve Sully, UK regional director for recruitment firm Robert Half. “We are seeing applicants frequently forwarding WhatsApp messages they receive from individuals claiming to be our consultants.” With so much work being done remotely, “it’s become much easier for scammers to take advantage of vulnerable people.”

Work-related fraud is more than just a nuisance that steals time from companies and job seekers. Scammers can take their victims’ money and personal data, and companies can have their reputations seriously damaged.

In February LinkedIn recognized an increase in the number and degree of sophistication of scams committed on its platform. The trend hits a number of job sites, recruiting firms and others.

Figures from the American Federal Trade Commission show that there were more than 92 thousand scams linked to jobs and companies in 2022, with the loss of US$ 367 million (R$ 1.78 billion), a sum considerably higher than the US$ 209 million (R$ 1.01 billion) from the previous year.

JobsAware, the British non-profit organization to which Mia reported Inglemoss Consultants, compiles complaints about employment scams and unfair labor practices and advises employees. Its director, Keith Rosser, said more people “are looking for additional work because of the cost of living crisis. It’s putting a lot of people out into the workforce and leaving them exposed.”

Ben King, director of consumer trust at Okta, which specializes in digital identity, said the danger is intensifying. “I predict that fake job scams will only increase with access to online learning and generative AI tools that create fake criminal emails and advertisements, targeting victims of specific sectors of the population, more realistically.”

The attacks are already getting more elaborate. Scammers often set up fake websites, conduct Skype interviews and, in some cases, demonstrate impressive knowledge of the industry in which they claim to work.

Jonathan Waterman-Smith, recruitment consultant at TRG Recruitment, said his experience reveals how scammers are approaching their targets with increasing sophistication, using industry-specific terminology that reveals a high level of research.

He was contacted on LinkedIn by someone 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 they work and the fees they charge. At first, he believed the scammer to be genuine.

“He wasn’t a novice,” Waterman-Smith said. “The guy knew the terminology we use in the recruiting industry. Either he had a lot of experience with it, or he knew the recruiting lingo and maybe he’s worked in the industry in the past.”

Recruiters like Waterman-Smith often identify potential candidates for their clients. When this so-called client suggested three potential candidates to be interviewed, he realized that something strange was going on.

He called the company in question and was told they had no information about the person ever being employed by the company. Had the scam gone through, Waterman-Smith said his company would have paid the applicants — likely the scammer’s cronies — and sent the scammer an invoice. And the bill would never have been paid.

“I was very lucky,” said Waterman-Smith. “I got away relatively unscathed, other than wasting half an hour of my time talking to the guy.”

Scammers target targets they have identified as vulnerable—for example, people who have recently lost their jobs or who are unaware of employment practices. “I could be considered an easy target,” Mia said. “They can certainly target professionals from other countries because they are not as up to date with British employment standards and laws.”

In December Alex Ellis, the British high commissioner to India, warned that scammers were using his name to persuade people to hand over information and money to obtain work visas for the UK.

For Mohammed Yasar Farath, a technician residing in Hyderabad, southern India, a link on a job posting site on Instagram led him to an alleged job offer at a power company in the UK. There was only one catch: he would have to pay £500 for a visa application. When he refused to hand over the money, “the so-called lawyer got very angry.” Farath understood that the job offer did not exist and that the visa would be fake. He gave up the venture and considers himself very lucky.

According to Sully, scammers pose a risk not only to candidates, but also to the reputation of recruiters and employers. Many companies are posting advice on how to avoid scams on their websites and social media channels.

Last summer, Amanda Chilcott, global director of human resources at Neptune Energy, was alerted to a sharp increase in the number of scammers posing as her employers, when potential victims called the front desk to report fraudulent emails. The company hired a cybersecurity firm to prevent unauthorized domains from using its name.

That’s harder for smaller firms, King said, who “don’t have the resources to adequately monitor and control this risk.”

While increasingly advanced AI tools can make scams more frequent and plausible, they will also “be invaluable tools for organizations to monitor and control content at a speed that no human review can achieve,” King said. “Important research is being done to detect machine-generated content in large datasets. Simply having a job title or job posting marked ‘suspicious’ can save many people from being scammed in the first place, or lead to them to do more research before moving forward with a job application.”

Employers are also vulnerable to dishonest candidates. Satish Kumar, chief executive of Glider AI, a tech platform that offers virtual assessments and video recruiting interviews that screen for suspicious activity, said the rise in remote hiring has led to an increase in fraud among job applicants, who can, for example, be helped by friends who give them the answers to questions.

Once a candidate has gone through the recruitment process, it can take at least a month for the firm to discover that he or she is not qualified for the position. Hiring someone else can be costly. “The company loses a lot of time and has to restart the process,” said Kumar.

Scams can be traumatizing for their victims. Fatima, who has filed a complaint against Inglemoss Consultants in an employment tribunal, to which the organization has not responded, commented: “This has caused me a lot of anxiety. They manipulate vulnerable people. It’s hard to realize it’s a scam until you’re already involved .”

*Some names have been changed.

Translated by Clara Allain