The signs of a scam, why applying only on an employer’s own domain closes most of them off, and what to do if you have already replied to one.
Job scams are common, they are getting better written, and Florida — with its large retiree population and its constant churn of people moving in — is a favoured place to run them. Most of them depend on reaching you somewhere other than the employer’s own site, which is the one thing this board never does. Here is what to look for anyway.
The signs
- You are asked to pay. For training, for equipment, for a background check, for a starter kit, for “processing”. A real employer pays for its own background checks and ships its own laptops. Any request for money, a gift card, or your bank details before you have a signed offer is a scam.
- A cheque arrives before work does. The classic version: you are sent a cheque, told to deposit it and forward part of it to a “vendor”. The cheque bounces days later and the money you forwarded is gone.
- The offer comes fast and without an interview, or after a text-message “interview” on a chat app. Large employers interview by video or in person, through their own systems, and they take weeks.
- The email address is not the employer’s. A recruiter at a real company writes from that company’s domain. A message from a free webmail address, or from a domain one letter off the employer’s, is not the employer.
- The pay is out of line with the role. The employer pages show what an employer’s real postings pay; a “data entry” job at twice the top of the band is bait.
- You are asked for identity documents up front. A real employer collects your Social Security number and identification at the offer stage, through its own onboarding system, for the federal I-9 form — never by email, never before an offer.
Why applying on the employer’s domain closes most of this off
Every apply button on this board opens the employer’s own careers site, and the address bar shows the employer’s domain. Applying there means your application goes into the employer’s applicant system; the recruiters who follow up are the employer’s, and their messages come from its domain and its system. A scam has to reach you around that — by finding your résumé on a general job site, by a text claiming to be from a company you applied to, by a copied posting on a board that lets anyone post. None of that is possible through a link that goes straight to the employer’s page. The applying guide covers what those pages look like.
Checking a message that claims to be from an employer
Go to the employer’s careers site yourself — not through a link in the message — and look for the posting and, if the site has one, a message centre. Check the sender’s domain against the site’s. Search for the recruiter’s name with the company’s. If a message asks you to continue the conversation on a chat app, or to download software to be interviewed, stop. A real recruiter will happily be checked and will not mind a delay.
If you have already replied
If you sent money, contact your bank at once; a transfer can sometimes be reversed within hours. If you deposited a cheque and forwarded funds, tell the bank before the cheque returns. If you gave identity details, place a fraud alert with one of the three credit bureaus — it obliges the others — and consider a credit freeze. Report the scam to the Federal Trade Commission at reportfraud.ftc.gov and to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center; both are used to prosecute and to warn others. Florida’s Attorney General also takes consumer-fraud complaints.
What this board does and does not do
Nobody can post a job here. Every listing is read from an employer’s own careers site, and every apply link leads back to it; there is no form to submit a posting, no paid placement, and no staffing agency reposting. If a listing here looks wrong — a title, a figure, an employer that should not be listed — tell us and we will check the source.