Too good to be true? Fake recruiters targeting job seekers

Mia* was skeptical when she was asked basic questions during a Zoom interview for a job in Human Resources. His suspicions were confirmed when his prospective employer demanded a £275 advance payment for recruit training. Suspecting it was a hoax, she retreated.

“When you think of scamming, you might think of a pickpocket or online, sending someone a faulty link. It’s not something elaborate and not in the job market,” she said. “I’m glad that I was suspicious from the beginning.”

Mia first came across the scammers after moving to London from Australia. She applied for and failed to get a job as an HR administrator with a unit trading as Inglemoss Consultants, which was actually advertised on the job site. A week later, she was contacted and told that she had been selected for a different HR role.

He was right to be careful. Three others told the Financial Times that they had been scammed by Ingelmoss Consultants. One, Jamie Glover, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Sussex, said he landed a role with the organization last year and paid for a £275 training package. After a day’s training, they were tasked with recruiting more candidates. But he got little work and was never paid.

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

On the recruitment website Glassdoor, seven anonymous reviewers said that representatives of Ingelmoss Consultants lied about the nature of the job, did not pay employees and did not respond to phone calls or emails. In fact said it deleted the organization’s account in November 2022 following a fraud investigation and complaints from job seekers.

“Inglemoss Consultants” does not appear at Companies House, messages sent to email addresses listed on its website were returned and the business, including one of the scam victim’s managers, did not answer phone calls.

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

“We are seeing a scary amount of this on a daily basis,” said Steve Sully, UK regional director of recruiter Robert Half. “We are regularly seeing candidates forwarding WhatsApp messages they receive from persons claiming to be (our) advisors.” With so much remote work, “it’s all too easy for scammers to take advantage of vulnerable people”.

Job related fraud is much more than a time consuming nuisance to job seekers and companies. Victims can be defrauded of money and personal data, while businesses can suffer considerable reputational damage.

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

Figures from the US Federal Trade Commission show that there will be more than 92,000 job-related and business scams in 2022, recording a loss of $367mn, which is significantly higher than the previous year’s $209mn.

I expect[fake job scams]to only increase with access to generative AI online. , , that make fake job ads and emails more realistic

Jobsaware, a UK non-profit organization for which Mia reported to Inglamos Consultants, collates job scams and complaints of unfair work practices and advises workers. Its chairman, Keith Rosser, said more people were “looking for additional work because of the cost of living crisis”. “It’s putting and exposing a lot of people to the job market.”

Ben King, head of customer trust at digital identity specialist Okta, said the threat was growing. “I expect[fake job scams]to only grow with access to online generative AI (and) logic learning machine tools, which make fake job ads and emails more realistic than criminals, targeted to specific victim demographics. “

Already, fraud attacks are becoming more elaborate, with scammers often setting up fake websites, conducting interviews via Skype and, in some cases, commanding influencers in the industry they claim to work in. Let’s perform.

Jonathan Waterman-Smith, a recruitment consultant at TRG Recruitment, said his experience showed how scammers were targeting with increased sophistication, using industry-specific terminology that demonstrated a high level of research.

He was contacted on LinkedIn by a man posing as a “talent acquisition team lead” at a construction company who wanted help hiring workers.

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

“He was not a novice,” Waterman-Smith said. “This guy knew the terminology we use in the recruiting industry. He either had a lot of experience doing this or knew about recruiting jargon and likely was in the industry in the past.

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

He called the company to inquire and was told that they had no record of the person being an employee. Had the scam gone according to plan, Waterman-Smith expected that his company would have paid the applicants – and potential associates of the scammer – and invoiced the fraudster, only to not pay the bill.

“I was very lucky,” Waterman-Smith said. “Besides wasting half an hour talking to this guy, I came out relatively clean.”

Scammers prey on people they have identified as vulnerable, such as people who have recently lost their jobs or who are unfamiliar with employment practices. “I can be considered an easy target,” Mia said. “Certainly, they can target international (workers) because they are not as privy to UK employment laws and norms here.”

British High Commissioner to India Alex Ellis in December warning Scammers were using his name to persuade people to hand over information and money to gain UK work visas.

For Mohammed Yasser Farath, a technician based in Hyderabad, southern India, a link through a job posting site on Instagram led him to an alleged offer from an energy company in the UK. One drawback: he has to pay £500 for the visa application. After refusing to hand over the money, “the so-called lawyer . . . became very irate”. Firth realized the job offer didn’t exist and the visa was a scam. He moved on and considers himself “very lucky”.

Scammers are a risk not only to candidates, Sully said, but to employers and employers’ reputations using “(a) brand as a facade”. Many businesses are posting advice on how to avoid scams on their websites and social media channels.

Last summer, Amanda Chilcott, director of global human resources at Neptune Energy, was alerted to a “big increase in scammers” when potential victims called reception about fraudulent emails. The company hired a cyber security group to block unauthorized domains using its name.

It’s tougher for smaller companies, King said, “lacking the resources to effectively contain and control this threat”.

While developing AI tools may make scams more ubiquitous and reliable, they “will also prove to be a valuable tool for organizations to monitor and control content in a way that no human review can match,” King said. ,Significant research is ongoing to detect machine-generated content on large data sets, and flagging just one post or job ad as ‘suspicious’ could save many people from being victimized or job applications being denied. They may be motivated to do a thorough investigation before placing. ,

Employers are also sensitive to dishonest candidates. Satish Kumar, chief executive officer of Glider AI, a tech platform providing virtual assessments and video interviews to recruiters that screen for suspicious activity, said the rise in remote hiring led to an increase in fraud by job candidates is, for example, being fed answers by friends.

Once a candidate goes through the recruitment process, it can take at least a month to find out that he/she is not fit for the job. Hiring again is expensive. “The company loses so much time and has to start the process all over again,” Kumar said.

For individuals, fraud can be intimidating. Fatima, who made a claim against Ingelmoss Consultants at an employment tribunal to which the organization did not respond, said: “It worried me a lot. They played on vulnerable people and it was hard to know it was a scam when Unless you are already in it.

*some names have been changed