AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Have you ever gotten one of these texts?
(SOUNDBITE OF MESSAGE DING)
RASCOE: (Reading) Hi. Your background and resume have been recommended by multiple online recruitment agencies.
And then it goes on to offer work, often remote, often with flexible hours. Those are scams and one form of what's called ghost jobs. The other kind of ghost job doesn't pop up on your phone. They're listed right there on real corporate websites. Chris Maurer is a cybersecurity expert who teaches commerce at the University of Virginia, and he joins us now. Welcome.
CHRIS MAURER: Great to be here.
RASCOE: The Federal Trade Commission says hundreds of thousands of those text messages were sent to Americans in the first half of this year alone, and watchdogs say they've made or cost more than $300 million over that same period. How does this scam work?
MAURER: Generally speaking, the scammers try to get you interested and think that you have an opportunity to make real money. They might ask you to do some simple tasks from home - reviewing some documents, posting online product reviews - and then they pay you for that. Typically, what happens is they, quote, overpay you. Through some creative use of technology, it makes it seem as though they might pay you $5,000 when they originally said you would be paid $500. So then they realize their mistake and then ask you to pay them $4,500 back. That's the real scam - is that you had never been given $5,000, but you now have paid them $4,500.
RASCOE: How do the scammers make you think you got $5,000 when you didn't?
MAURER: In a similar way in which when you go to a gas station and use a debit card, usually, they put a hold of up to $100 or $200 just to make sure that there's money there. So they kind of do a pending transfer via PayPal, Venmo, some kind of financial institution that, if you checked your account, it would make it seem as though it's real. But they can easily claw that back and never actually give that money to you.
RASCOE: And this isn't the only kind of ghost job out there. Tell me more about the ones being dangled by real, legitimate employers.
MAURER: There's plenty of real employers, well-known companies that you can recognize that have job postings they're simply not actively hiring for. So this could be because they've already filled the position, but they leave it open. Or they just are creating positions so that they can capture resumes and just maintain interest from people that when they do have the actual posting, they already have a pool of candidates that they can immediately go to. It's not a scam, per se, like the text messages, but it still is misleading in many ways.
RASCOE: Job postings are actually, like, a really big way that we assess the health of our economy. Are these fake job postings prevalent enough to misdirect policymakers?
MAURER: There's no doubt that it's public information, and there's plenty of people both in the government sector and elsewhere that monitor these types of job boards to gauge the health of our labor force. The more active job postings there are, it does make it seem as though the labor force is very active, that there's a high demand for increasing and creating new jobs in this country. It can also send a signal internal to the companies. And so if you work at a company that is constantly posting these fake jobs, it could motivate you to say, hey, I need to work harder as an employee because, you know, this company is constantly out there looking for new employees. My job could be at risk. And so it can be a way of motivating internal employees as well.
RASCOE: Is there any way to protect yourself from both kinds of ghost jobs?
MAURER: My professional background is more on the scam side. And so the protection there is everything that we do online, whether it's responding to a text message, clicking on links, is just to always pause and think before we act. Ask yourself, is it highly likely that for a job that I have to pay money to someone else? When it comes to ghost jobs that are from legitimate companies, online job boards are great to see a bunch of jobs, but if it's a real job, there has to be a human behind it. Instead of just dropping a resume, you can always try to reach out to the actual company. Also, if you are just generally in the market for a job, really work your network because you might be able to find a job much easier as opposed to sifting through these thousands and thousands of online jobs, some of which might not even be a real posting.
RASCOE: That's cybersecurity expert Chris Maurer. Thanks so much for talking with us.
MAURER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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