Have you ever received an unsolicited offer of employment? Maybe via email, text or on social media? If so, the best action you could have taken is to ignore it. Because if something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
This scam has been around for a while now, but it takes different shapes each season. The basic gist of it is, the scammers blast out mass messages to huge lists, and figure that even with a low rate of return, a few poor innocent victims will bite.
They may ask for you to pay a non-refundable fee. Or, maybe you will have a wonderful work-from-home job, but you must purchase the required equipment first. Perhaps a non-profit is emailing you, and wants to deposit a starting bonus into your account, and all you need to do is supply your bank account info. These are other tell-tale signs of a scam. They want something from you, and there’s probably a limited time for this opportunity too!
The problem is that many college students are actually after exactly these sorts of part-time, side-hustle jobs, so the rate of return is slightly higher for communities like ours. The University of Houston has a great flowchart that could help you process potentially fraudulent job offers. While you wouldn’t report these to their support team as shown on the image, you may certainly forward them to spam@williams.edu for us to review.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) cares about these scams too, and has a page with good resources worth a look. If you want to learn more about fake job scams, try using the following prompt in your favorite LLM, like ChatGPT or Bard:
Describe the risk of so-called “employment scams” or fraudulent job offers