The diabolically clever scam that keeps duping desperate Gen Zers

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a day ago

It's easy to read a text offering what is clearly a fake job and think, "Who in the world would fall for this?" Of course, Temu or Target isn't going to send me an unsolicited message with a too-good-to-be-true employment offer out of the blue. Except scammers don't do things that don't work — so while it may seem obvious to you, there are people who absolutely fall for these tricks, and no one is immune.
Scam texts have exploded in recent years (which I probably don't have to tell you — if you have a cellphone, you're most likely well aware). Consumers reported losing $470 million to text message scams in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission, five times the amount reported in 2020. The actual amount of money lost could be much higher, given that many people don't alert the FTC when scammed. Fake package delivery was the most common scam, but the No. 2 was job offers — texts from purported recruiters either offering positions at well-known companies or promising big bucks in exchange for doing online tasks that seem relatively mundane.
"We are definitely seeing both a growth in reported losses to text scams and also a growth in reported losses to job scams," says Kati Daffan, an attorney for the FTC in its Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Reported losses to job scams increased more than three times between 2020 and 2023."
Now, the flood of job scams could get even worse. There is increased opportunity for dupers: The labor market is getting rockier, Americans are increasingly on edge about their finances, and many people really want to work remotely. At the same time, the means of cranking out these texts is getting more sophisticated: AI makes scam texts easier to craft in ways that seem plausible and realistic. The overall result is that unsuspecting job seekers may become even more susceptible to hoaxes.
"It's likely that as unemployment increases and more people are worried about the economic uncertainty, if the scams aren't necessarily increasing, the likelihood that people might fall for them will be," says Selena Larson, a staff threat researcher at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company.
The way scam texts work is pretty straightforward: You get a message out of nowhere about a supposed thrilling work opportunity. It may come from a phone number, or it's from an official-looking email address. The offer seems enticing, albeit somewhat unrealistic given how jobs and money usually go — it may promise a super-high salary for just a couple of hours a day of menial online work. It can also come with some weird facets, such as conducting interviews entirely via text, promising to pay in crypto, or asking you to pay them before they pay you.
Eva Velasquez, the CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit, says her organization saw a big bump in job scam reports in 2023 that took them by surprise. Since then, the number has ebbed and flowed, but the scams are here to stay. "They are very lucrative. They can capture not only your data but often your money," she says.
Scammers get people to hand over personal information that would be par for the course for a legit hiring process — Social Security numbers, pictures of their driver's licenses and passports, bank account numbers. That information can be used to try to steal people's identities and for other nefarious ends. And for someone who really wants a new job, the mundanity of the requests can be deceiving. "That I think is why it's confusing to people is when you have a legitimate offer and you do start with an employer, they do need that information," Velasquez says.
As much as many people like to feel that they'd never fall for a scam, we're all susceptible to them, to some extent.
What's not so normal is job scammers asking victims to kick in their own money. The trick goes like this: After supposedly hiring someone or getting far enough in the process, the scammer will send someone a check and ask them to buy work-related equipment with it, such as a printer or office supplies. But the check will be for more money than the stuff costs, so they'll ask the person to send the difference back. Later, the check bounces, and the person is out of the money they spent on the equipment and sent to the scammer — and, potentially, in hot water for depositing a fake check. They may also ask people to buy gift cards or make payments to fake vendors who are in on the scam.
Daffan, from the FTC, says it has specifically seen a spike in task scams, in which consumers are asked to complete little activities online, such as liking videos or rating products on an app or platform, to earn commission. The texts say the activity is for "product boosting" or "app optimization," which can sound realistic. "But then once people start doing this work, there's a whole system designed to trick them to actually pay money into the app, and eventually, they'll end up losing money and never being given any of the money that they were promised," Daffan says.
And as much as many people like to feel that they'd never fall for a scam, we're all susceptible to them, to some extent.
"It relies on this concept of social engineering and the hackers being very compelling. They make you feel something, they make you feel excited," Larson says. "They make you feel like you want to be a part of this ecosystem, that this job is a great opportunity that you don't want to lose."
The stereotypical victim of a fraudster is an older person — your grandmother on the phone with someone who claims to be from Publishers Clearing House, telling her she's won a million dollars but has to kick in some of her own cash first. But in the modern world, that stereotype is out of date, including when it comes to job text scams: A lot of young people take the bait.
Gen Zers and millennials are used to doing everything online, even making major life decisions. Nothing, whether it's booking a vacation, renting an apartment, or paying a friend back, feels like a "big screen" task anymore, let alone a do-this-in-person one. It's all on the small screen.
"I'm a Gen Xer. For me, someone conducting very serious business over text just doesn't resonate with me," Velasquez says. "For young people, they're like, we do everything over text. It doesn't raise alarm bells."
You look at the Gen Zs and the younger millennials and they just click, click, click, click, click, click.
Younger people are more accustomed to the idea of side hustles. They're in the hunt for extra cash, especially if they can earn it with little effort online, and "like these videos for money" may not seem that abnormal to them in a world where "post videos on TikTok for money" is an aspired-to reality.
Gen Z also faces an especially tough job market. Between tech layoffs and federal government job cuts, many avenues they may have pursued have dried up. Companies aren't hiring the way they were a few years ago, and people with jobs aren't quitting. That can specifically affect younger people looking to get a foot in the door — if nobody's going out, they can't get in. The result: a generation that's extra prone to falling into scams offering jobs and side-hustle cash.
"You look at the Gen Zs and the younger millennials and they just click, click, click, click, click, click," says Alex Quilici, the CEO of YouMail, a service that helps block scam texts and calls.
As I reported this story, I became increasingly alarmed about job scam texts. If the labor market is worsening, meaning more people are going to fall for this stuff, shouldn't we be doing more to stop it? On the list of a million worries, I'd really rather not add "my niece got bamboozled out of $1,000 because of some click farm scam" to the list. It turns out that doing something about this is hard.
When I ask Kate Griffin, with the Aspen Institute's Financial Security Program, who's responsible for clamping down on scam texts, she tells me, "That's the problem." It's sort of everyone's job, which also means it's sort of no one's job.
"A lot of people have a component part of it," she says. "There's a part of the FBI that goes after this. There's a part of the Treasury Department that is focused on the anti-money-laundering part of it. The FTC, of course, holds their component of it, but there's not a single coordinating entity to say, 'What is our national approach to fighting this?'"
As far as how the private sector can combat this, it's complicated, too. Griffin explains that while telecommunications companies are the infrastructure layer, they don't necessarily have the ability to know what's inside messages. She notes that CTIA, a trade association that represents the wireless industry, has a "secure messaging initiative" whose goal is to put a stop to unwanted or illegal text messages.
Besides its app that lets consumers block unwanted communications from spammers and scammers, Quilici's YouMail also collects data to alert phone carriers of scams and bad actors. Still, it's hard for companies to get their arms around the problem — scammers are savvy, and the business incentives to crack down on them aren't particularly compelling.
"If you wanted to try to stop it, you'd have to make it really, really difficult for anybody to get a phone number," Quilici says.
Texting and calling cost next to nothing. Making communications more expensive would make scamming less lucrative, but it would also make basic functions pricier for everyone else. Companies (or the government) could implement know-your-customer laws, as banks have, so carriers have to know whom they're giving a number to, but that would be onerous, too.
"There's a big tension between their desire to sell services and quickly and stopping fraud," Quilici says. "I don't view the carriers as bad guys. I view them as having a business problem."
The unwillingness of the government and phone carriers to make a concerted effort against scam texts puts a lot of onus on individual consumers to try to protect themselves, which is not an easy task. A lot of these scams look realistic — ChatGPT makes it easier to write a scam, meaning the grammar mistakes that might have set off some spidey senses are less likely to appear. These scams don't just take place via text; they can also come in emails or even in social media messages on platforms such as LinkedIn, where contact from a recruiter would seem quite normal. And they often invoke big-name companies that people would like to work for, which may increase the likelihood that someone falls for a trick.
What's one to do in this scenario? First, scrutinize where the text came from. (Is it a weird email address or a foreign phone number? Though scammers can make those look plausible, too.) Next, do a deep reading of the message itself, checking whether the grammar is right and whether the offer seems too good to be true. A six-figure job for clicking boxes on an app sounds lovely, but it's also not a thing that exists. Mention of pay in crypto is a red flag, as are interviews via text. If the alleged employer asks you for money, that's a no-no. As a general rule, you shouldn't have to pay money to make money.
"Our advice is never click on links or respond to unexpected texts or WhatsApp messages or other messages about jobs. Real employers will never contact you that way," Daffan says. She asks people to report fraud to the FTC.
One of the reasons that job scams are flourishing is that many people do want to work extra and make extra income.
If you do think a job offer could be legitimate, see whether you can find the listing online — and make sure it's real and matches on details such as salary and location. People can also just contact the prospective employer directly to find out if it is a fake. And if you do get scammed out of money, contact your bank immediately and try to get the money back.
Ultimately, Quilici says, the best advice is to slow down. There's no need to respond to that job offer text right away. Larson echoes the point. "If they're trying to rush you, they're trying to hire you, and they ask to be paid for something, that's all red flags," she says. Anyone who's interviewed for a job lately knows that the process can drag on for a wildly long time.
Overall, the good news is that as time goes on and more people learn about scams, the more we collectively become inoculated to different tactics and hoaxes. People were highly susceptible to email scams when they first got email addresses. Now, you still hear about them, but they're a lot less common, and most people have an easier time spotting them.
In the meantime, the bad news is that a tougher labor market means we may not have time for this natural collective education to happen. When people are anxious about money and work, they're likelier to have blind spots that scammers know how to exploit. If you're on month five of the job search and worried about how you're going to pay rent, you'll probably reply to that text faster than you would under normal circumstances.
"One of the reasons that job scams are flourishing is that many people do want to work extra and make extra income, and they're looking for an opportunity to do that," Daffan says. "And scammers know that, and so they know there's a big market out there if they can have a convincing job scam. And, unfortunately, that is the case."
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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