Hi there! I almost just got scammed today, and I’m going to take the LITTANY of red flags from this interaction and use it to teach you all about how to avoid scams.
I am not making very much money right now. I just lost one of the accounts I was writing for, so I am not not even making enough to pay my rent. So I am desperately looking for work. And, like many people desperately looking for work, my panicking subconscious is willing to see a red flag and brush it under the rug because
“I’m probably being paranoid.”
So, to all of my lovely artists, writers, editors, and other types of freelancers who are desperately looking for work, I would like to create a comprehensive list of things that you should NOT FUCKING IGNORE while looking for a job. Actually, the list will be formatted as things you should expect from your employer/interviewer and if these things are missing, get the fuck out of there.
1. Reputable Platforms
The first thing you should be expecting is to use reputable platforms. If you’re being asked for a virtual interview, you should expect your interviewer to invite you via Skype, Discord, (Maybe slack if they’re middle-aged), perhaps Whatsapp, or whatever website you’re using to find your job.
DO NOT go for interviews on Telegram. This app has been reported as very commonly being associated with scams. This is where my recent experience took place.
2. Willingness to Verify Legitimacy
The first thing you should do when being in contact with an interviewer or HR is ask them to verify their identity.
This may not be necessary if doing a video call with someone pictured on an official company website, receiving emails or texts from addresses/numbers that are listed on an official company website, or if the job you’re being interviewed for was applied to directly on the company website. In these cases, you are not likely to be scammed, as you’re working with verifiably information.
If you meet someone on Indeed, Fiverr, Upwork, or any other freelancing/job site, keep your contact within the website’s chat system, email system, or whatever. This is how you remain protected under the hiring site’s TOS/Legal whatever. If you get scammed because you took your hiring process elsewhere, they will not help you.
That being said, if you DO take your interview off the site, it should be somewhere reputable and you should ask for your interviewer to verify their identity before doing literally anything else. The best way to get them to verify their identity is to ask them to email or text you from an address or phone number listed clearly on the official company website, by asking them to show you their state ID and checking it for photoshop influence, or by asking to do a video call for the interview and seeing for yourself that you’re being interviewed by someone who is pictured on the official company website as an employee.
3. Clear and Professional Procedures
Any professional working as an interviewer or human resources personnel will have a skillset related to communication and organization. When being interviewed you should expect a number of questions about your skills and how you’re valuable to the company, etc. However, this is easy to fake, as a scammer. What you need to look out for is that they show a clear amount of structure.
If you’re asked for an interview, no real company will demand you be quick about responding. If they’re interested in an interview, a legitimate company is not likely to ask you to do the interview immediately. They will ask you to schedule an interview time with them. They may ask if you have availabilities that day, but they will not just start interviewing you immediately.
After the interview, any professional company will tell you that they will get back to you when they’ve made a decision about your interview. No professional company will tell you to wait for an indefinite amount of time while they talk to HR peers. If a company Does want you to wait, because they intend to make a quick decision, they will give you an expected wait time, as that is the courteous and professional thing to do. They will not expect you to be on-call for this period of time. A time projection is simply to give you an idea of what to expect. For example, “I’ll be in touch within the next 1-3 hours about the results of your interview. Thank you for your time.”
Furthermore, if you are accepted for a job, any professional company will make a clear outline of exactly how they plan to introduce you into company life. They will respect your time and ask you to schedule things with them. For example, “Is there a period of 2-3 hours within the next few days where you would be available for an orientation?”
No professional company will demand you do anything at any particular time. That is not how legitimate professionals treat new employees. You will be asked to schedule things with them. Even when you’re assigned work hours, if the exact hours you’re applying for are not listed in the job description you applied for, they will ask you to fill out some kind of time sheet to outline your availabilities, then schedule you for times within that outline.
4. Doesn’t Show Signs of Money Scamming
There are two major red flags when it comes to money scams. Your interviewer should never ask you what bank you use and your interviewer should never ever tell you they’re going to send you a check, unless they send your paycheck as a check.
One of the more common scams at the moment is run by people pretending to be members of legitimate companies, hiring freelancers for things like proofreading and editing. These remote positions may require home office hardware, right? The interviewer will tell you you’re missing some hardware and software that are required for the job. Then they’ll tell you that they will send a check that you can cash and use to buy the required materials.
This is even sketchier if they email you front and back images of the check and tell you to print it and then deposit it through mobile banking. The way this works is that, if you cash the check successfully, you will then buy the list of software, which is usually completely unrelated to the job you’re being hired for, then they will cancel the check, which hasn’t cleared completely. That leaves you with ~$2k dollars less in your bank and their money right back where it started in theirs. Presumably, the scammers are the ones selling the software. So, that $2k dollars you just spent is also going into their bank account.
Professional companies will never offer to send you checks to buy products. If they have official hardware or software that they want you to use, they will buy it themselves and then send it to you. There is never a reason why a new hire should buy hardware or software out of their own bank, whether they have been given money for it or not.
Furthermore, a legitimate company will never ever pay you before you have signed and sent your contract to them. One of the obvious giveaways of the scam I was almost caught in was that I was sent the contract last night and I asked if I could send it in today, since it was getting late. The interviewer agreed. I signed it in the morning and then asked him if I should send it in a reply to the email I got the original contract from or if there’s another email I need to send it to. He completely ignored my question, asked me how I was doing, and then went into the check-related information so I could buy software.
The issue was bothering me ALL DAY. I knew there was something extremely weird about that, so I asked again a few hours later. His response? “You have nothing to worry about.” ?????? I was aghast. I wasn’t worried at all! I just wanted an answer! If he had simply told me to respond to the email I’d gotten the contract from, I might have fallen for his scam! What a terrible scammer smdh
A Non-Exhaustive List of Other Red Flags
Your interviewer shows a poor grasp on the language
If your interviewer is making frequent grammatical errors that are glaringly obvious to any native speaker, that is a huge red flag. HR reps and interviewers are hired because of their communication skills. It is highly unlikely that someone who makes non-native-like errors is legitimate unless they are actually openly non-native, in which case, it’s not so alarming.
Your interviewer is showing impatience or demanding you at certain times
If your interviewer is telling you to “report back by 8am tomorrow” without any kind of prior agreement that this is an acceptable time for you to meet, that is extremely unprofessional and shows a lack of patience. Scammers want to get to the meat of their scam quickly and will use an air of professional superiority and authority to scare you into moving faster than necessary.
Your interviewer shows a lack of opening and closing statements
Along the lines of the clear processes that I mentioned above anybody who is initiating you in the job you’re taking should show clear opening and closing statements. What I mean by this is: professionals in human resources or management positions will not keep you as a social hostage. If you’ve been discussing how you’ll begin training or somesuch, they will not just leave you hanging. You should have a dedicated time slot where you will have your discussion and, at the end of it, your supervisor should make a closing statement. For example, “It looks like our time is running out for today. What would be a good time to pick this up tomorrow?”
If you feel like you are “on-call” and unable to leave the room because the interviewer or supervisor keeps messaging, has not outlined a time slot for you to talk in, won’t seem to let you go, or shows no indication of stopping, that is a really bad sign. Either the company is legitimate and TERRIBLE at professionalism (a great sign you should run anyway), or this is a scammer intent on getting you to follow their instructions as soon as they can.
Your interviewer ignores time zones or gets them wrong
When I was contacted about doing an interview yesterday, it was 4:30pm. I did the interview and was told I got the job. Immediately after, without asking if I was free, he began listing off instructions and things I was to expect. It wasn’t until 7:30pm that he sent me the contract and asked me to review it, sign it, and send it back that I finally asked if I could do that tomorrow. The interviewer was supposedly on the west coast and knew that I was on the east coast. He agreed by saying “Alright” and then told me to report to him “by 8am your time.”
There are 3 things about this that are weird. The first is that he demanded I show up at 8am to continue where we left off. Any professional would have asked when I’m available the next day to continue. the second is that he said “your time” instead of saying EST, as most professionals in the US would be apt to do. And, lastly, I showed up at 7:50am, ready to continue, because I’m that desperate that I’m willing to be pushed around, and he showed up at 9am on the dot. He had gotten the time wrong. Nobody who works professionally on the west coast is incapable of adding 3 hours to their time. It was a rookie mistake, or a mistake made by someone in a completely different time zone than they say they are.
When asked to verify their identity, your interviewer attempts to reassure you or refuses
When I finally was fed up and knew this must be a scam, I politely asked my interviewer to verify his identity by either showing me his US ID or by contacting me from his email or phone number listed on the official company website. He sent me a photoshopped nametag with a completely different person’s name and photo on it and said it was the company ID of the HR director.
I have never seen a facade fall so pathetically. Why would literally any even remotely legitimate person do such a thing? It was sad, really. He deleted the message in less than a minute - no doubt to keep me from looking at it long enough to see how badly it was photoshopped - and then aggressively reassured me that the company meant me no harm and would pay for everything, etc. Any real professional would have simply sent me an email from the legitimate address, stating that they’re legitimate, and then continued on with the initiation process.
Learn from My Mistakes
I hope some of this was helpful for all of you lovely freelancers trying to find work. I thought I would know a scam when I saw one, and I did have a Bad Feeling about this whole thing, because it did feel too good to be true, but I was desperate enough that my judgement was heavily clouded, and that could happen to anyone.
Don’t ignore red flags - especially these ones. Stick up for yourself. Avoid confirmation bias. I looked things up repeatedly to confirm that the company was legitimate and that it’s normal to do things like mobile deposit a printed check and so on. Every time, I found an explanation that suited me. I even tried to cash the check. The only reason it didn’t work was because there was an error with the name on the check because I recently legally changed my name and PayPal was having some kind of issue updating in some areas of its website. It was after that that I realized this was all crashing down and I needed to reassess it all. Don’t let yourself get that deep into it.
