Employment Scams

"I don't know what it says about the economy that the scams have gone from 'free money' to 'stock market advice' to 'do you want a job', but it's probably not good." - Joke popular in 2025

Basic Information

Employment scams are a common kind of fraud, especially in poor job markets where marks are desperate. The grifter reaches out to someone looking for work, and offers a job. Often, the scam comes in one of a few basic forms:

• The job seeker is asked to buy something (such as equipment) from a specific "supplier" at their own expense, often promised reimbursement or given it upfront in the form of a check that will never clear.
  • Alternatively the victim is obliged to buy their raw materials from the employer, who adjusts the cost, relative to that at which they buy the finished product so that the actual return to the victim is minimal.
  • Other variations involve jobs that require the "employee" to pay upfront for training, or post a "bond" of some kind (especially if the job doesn't involve anything near the kind of trust that would justify one).
  • A related trick is the task scam, where the victim carries out small makework jobs that tick up an "account balance" which is suddenly dropped into negatives by a "VIP task" and must be made up to continue.
• As part of the application process, the job seeker is asked to give identity information (used for identity theft) or banking details (used to drain the account).
  • Low end versions of this can simply involve selling an applicant's phone number or other personal but not private information to either other scammers or the kind of borderline-legitimate marketer who buys them.
  • Higher end versions can involve tricking the mark into opening a bank account or credit card themselves - since they themselves opened the account, it can be hard to argue that it was opened illegitimately.
• The job itself is real, but involves the employee unwittingly taking part in a crime. A common example is redistributing packages containing smuggled, stolen, or otherwise "hot" items, or acting as a "mule" in a money laundering scheme - even if strict liability doesn't attach, the mark can have substantial difficulty convincing the government that they didn't know what was happening, and may not know enough to turn state's evidence.
• The job is real, but promised wages are never paid - or only partially paid. Alternatively, the victim is provided as "contract labour" to a third party that believes that the scammer is paying them. Extreme versions of this can include various forms of unfree labour - historically being tricked into working on a ship or at a remote mine, logging camp or farm was quite common.
• The job is subject to a contract with horrendous terms which the victim is tricked into signing - pressured into not reading it, badly misinformed about what it means, or presented with it in an effectively leonine situation.
  • Such a contract may not even be legal - the courts are increasingly looking with disfavor on such things as overly-broad noncompetes, let alone actual indentured servitude or "agreements" premised on coercion or misrepresentation - but simply having the contract and being able to make empty legal threats based on it can be enough to intimidate someone without legal training into compliance.
• Mix and match - anyone willing to run one scam could well have others lined up, and nothing about any of the variations precludes any others.

The company store/company scrip scam - albeit usually so blatantly performed as to struggle to qualify as a scam - is often allied to employment scams: where the employee is paid in a form that can only be spent in places controlled by the employer, thus allowing a further profit, and potentially forcing them deeper into debt and dependency. Other scummy behavior has also been known, ranging from outright wage theft in the form of unpaid overtime to technically non-fraudulent acts like requiring work as part of the application or interview process which is then used without compensation - but such may be beyond the scope of this article.

Common warning signs of a job scam include:

• Being paid in unusual ways, such as digital currency or through third-party payment apps.
• Being asked to pay anything - legitimate jobs will either provide equipment and licensing or leave the employee responsible for obtaining it, will count any training as paid work, and will NEVER demand that the employee pay them directly.
• Not being asked to complete usual employment paperwork - legitimate jobs will almost always involve at minimum proving that you have a right to work in your country and signing an employment contract.
• Being asked to complete employment paperwork too quickly - confidential information should only be turned over once a job offer has been made, and a job offer will almost never be made before the employer has seen your face.
• Sight-unseen contracts - if a contract is legitimate, there should be no objection to providing a review copy before making the decision to sign it.
• A job that involves using your personal address or bank account to forward anything.

Sources

The folk/Western song known various as the Range of the buffalo, the buffalo skinners or the hills of Mexico portrays an employment scam … albeit one that ends badly for the scammer. In the same vein (ahem) Sixteen tons portrays the plight of a worker caught in the company store scam.

Bibliography

1. FTC article

See Also

• Woman Posed as FBI Agent, Hired Neighbors

Game and Story Use

• As freelancers, adventurers might well end up being targeted by any or all of these.
• Like with other scams, an employment scam might involve higher-level manipulation rather than simply taking money or labor. This is especially true of the variations that involve doing some kind of work; standing outside a building and noting when the armored car comes by (for example) might not even be the weirdest thing someone's done for a paycheck.
  • An example of this appears in the Sherlock Holmes story The Red-Headed League.
  • Or it can simply be another layer of scam… this arcanist recently dodged a training-fee variant that appeared to have mainly been cover for a pyramid scheme, allegedly also with shades of financial coercion through stolen credit cards.
• Being "shanghaied" (tricked or coerced into joining a ships crew) was the start to a lot of "adventures" for people in the C19.
• In the modern era, employment scams are often gateway to being trafficked - especially for young women promised respectable jobs and then forced into prostitution. Young men also still find themselves shipped overseas and coerced into working on agricultural, construction or mining projects in dreadful conditions.
  • If you don't fancy that as a character background, it at least provides something to investigate … or a source for the enemy's mooks.
  • For added scammy "fun," there are accounts of people relocating for a scam job and then being bundled off to call centers and forced to run telephone scams - usually some flavor of identity theft or insurance fraud rather than the same scam that got them, the scam industry is nothing if not varied. See 260 foreigners rescued from virtual slavery in Myanmar’s online scam centers are being repatriated.
• The unwitting accomplice variation can be a major headache for characters investigating organized crime - sorting out the desperate and gullible from genuine malefactors can be immensely difficult. Likely a major reason the scam is run in the first place…
• As in the flavor text, a lot of these being around is a bad sign even aside from the crime itself - a labor market where people are desperate enough to ignore obvious warning signs (or tolerate scam-adjacent scumbag behavior from even "legitimate" employers) is unlikely to be good for anyone in it.