Name: Why You Are Getting So Many Fake Job Offers By Text
Uploaded: 2025-04-24T02:55:53.000Z
Duration: 10 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Have you ever received a text message like this offering you a job?

Hi, I'm Emily from Robert Hafner National Recruitment.

We have an opening position for part-time and full-time jobs.

Salaries range from $200 to $800 per day.

If you're interested in this opportunity, please send a text message to 347-725-7663.

On September 13th, 2024, Sunita Dalgoda, a 37-year-old freelance software engineer from North Carolina, received one too.

Without much thought, the mother of two clicked the Microsoft Teams link.

I was expecting a video interview on Teams, but surprisingly, it was a text interview, and it was more than an hour long.

Interview went well, and they told me that they will get back to me in a few days.

Three days later, an offer letter landed in her inbox, but something felt off.

The biggest red flag she spotted was the scammer's email, careers at assurecarecareers.us, which they used to communicate instead of the legitimate at assurecare.com.

I found like it was a scam, so I never responded back.

Dalgoda was fortunate not to fall for the scam, but many others have lost millions to similar cons.

We've seen a huge increase in text job scams.

We received over 9,000 reports in 2023, but more than 20,000 in 2024.

Consumers reported losing $14.8 million in 2023, and that shot up to $61.2 million in 2024.

And the worrying thing is that we know these high numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, because of course not everyone reports to us when they experience this fraud.

Here's why job scams are filling up your text messages and how to protect yourself.

Emails, phone calls, and texts are scammers' top three contact methods.

Job scams via text have seen a sharp rise in reports and financial losses.

In 2020, 4,872 reports of job scams via text resulted in $2 million in losses.

But by 2024, those reports surged to 20,632, with losses escalating to $61.2 million.

The immediate response-driven nature and accessibility of texting has made it a preferred tool for scammers.

It usually takes people around 90 minutes to open an email, but with SMS, users open the message within 90 seconds.

So I think it's easy to communicate through the text rather than the call and the emails.

So that's the reason they are doing the text message for the people who are seeking the job.

Anything that is immediate, you're hardwired to respond to it.

So a text has a certain amount of immediacy to it.

So you see that and you go, oh, I need to either click on that link or I need to call that phone number, whatever it is that it's asking you to do.

We're just sort of natural instinct is to do that, which is why it's important we resist that natural instinct.

I have noticed that email scams have been around for a very long time and we're somewhat accustomed to being concerned when we get an unexpected email.

But many of us, myself included, are using text messages to communicate all day long.

And so if you get a text message, it can be a moment where you quickly read it and respond to it.

The FTC has also warned about the rise of a particular job scam called a task scam, which is depleting people's bank accounts.

These are scams that often start with a text message about online work.

And when consumers respond to this, they're told they'll be completing tasks related to things like app optimization or product boosting or something like that.

And people really do actually start doing tasks and they may see some small payouts at the beginning from this supposed job.

But over time, they are asked to pay money to complete the next series of tasks.

And so at the end of the day, consumers end up losing a lot of money to these scams.

And we have seen a really concerning increase in the last four years.

There were zero of them in 2020, then 5,000 reported in 2023, and that quadrupled to about 20,000 just in the first half of 2024.

So we want everyone to be aware to stay away from these unexpected text messages about jobs.

These task scams seem to offer us a low effort but high reward kind of gig.

And so people go, well, I can do two jobs, I can do three jobs, I'll do that, that's easy.

So it's playing to the nature that we have of, I can do more than what I'm doing.

And so you've got the people who are employment insecure and the people who are gig-oriented and it all comes together to create an environment where people are likely to click on these kinds of links.

One thing we've seen over many, many years at the Federal Trade Commission is that the scammers follow the headlines.

So whatever's going on in the world, scammers are going to try to use that to steal people's money.

Announced layoff in February surging by 245% to the highest level since the pandemic with the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the federal workforce playing not the only, but the biggest.

If you've been following the news, job cuts across the federal government, the nation's largest employer, continue to draw widespread attention.

Despite this massive wave of cuts, the Federal Reserve says the overall labor market remains balanced.

The layoffs that are happening here are, they're certainly meaningful to the people involved and they may be meaningful to a particular neighborhood or region or area, but at the national level, they're not significant yet.

Powell's comments on the overall labor market were reflected in the latest job reports as well.

Despite the unemployment rate ticking up to 4.2% in March, the U.S. economy added a stronger than expected 228,000 jobs.

That's up from a revised 117,000 in February and above the Dow Jones estimate of 140,000.

So overall, the economy is still growing and the job market does remain solid.

Unemployment is low, we are still adding jobs.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good job market for everyone.

We've seen hiring slow over the last two and a half years since about 2022.

So as a result, it is more difficult to find a job.

The number of applicants per job on LinkedIn is up 70% compared to 2022, looking at 2024.

Had a full-time job as a senior software engineer.

So since then, I've been working as a freelance, but the job market is really, very bad.

Workers' confidence in finding or keeping a job is at its lowest point on record, surpassing even the levels seen in spring of 2020.

Now that the labor market is more competitive, people may be willing to take jobs that they weren't necessarily willing to take before.

As a result, there may be some advertisements that they received that they would have previously ignored that they're willing to click on.

Folks who are looking to commit scams know this, and they may be taking advantage of that as a result.

Many people are always interested in finding a job or finding a side gig for extra income.

And so scammers are using that desire to try to steal people's money and personal information.

Government agencies like the FBI and FTC are issuing consumer alerts on how to protect yourself.

The FTC wants people to know that text-based job scams are a huge problem.

People are losing money, and you should protect yourself by never interacting with an unexpected text message about a job.

Real employers will never contact you that way.

If you get an unsolicited text or an unsolicited email or phone call, ignore it.

And the wonderful thing now that we see with our smartphones is all of the telecom carriers give you the option to report that as some kind of spam or malware or something.

So you should not only delete it, but also report it, because that helps both the telecom companies and the operators of your smartphone to understand what's happening, and they can then help block that.

If someone does think they've been the victim of a text-based job scam, they should consider doing a couple of things.

One is report it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.

This is the large database that we and other law enforcers use every day to help address scams.

And if people are worried that they've been the victim of identity theft, they should visit identitytheft.gov.

There are a few ways that you can try to protect yourself from job scams.

On LinkedIn, look for verification badges.

We verify whether the employer's information is true and correct.

Second, filter jobs that have been verified so that you're getting the most credible set of job postings.

Also, you can turn on warning messages on LinkedIn for harmful content, and that will help you filter out some of this noise.

When we fall victim to these things, we do feel very guilty.

We feel like, wait a minute, I'm smarter than this.

But the reality is these scams are very sophisticated.

These people who do this are very well organized, and now they have artificial intelligence to help.

So the tools they are using create letter-perfect websites.

We don't see texts anymore that have grammar problems and spelling problems, and the pitch itself is very compelling.