You’re a desperate job seeker, and you’ve had a crappy week. Applying for jobs like it’s a full-time job in itself, keeping your motivation up, and being rejected over and over again can wear you down. And it can also make you more susceptible to scams. Learning how to identify hiring scams isn’t as simple as it used to be. Scammers are getting more sophisticated and cleverer than ever. So, that means that you have to, too.

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What is a Hiring Scam?

While you can probably guess what a hiring scam is, it’s important to explain it first, just to have all our bases covered.

A hiring scam is a way that criminals use a job seeker’s desperation to steal money or information for their operation.

There are many different types of scams, and lately, these shady individuals have begun preying on job seekers who are just looking for their next paycheck. This is extra nefarious (at least to me), because it relies on fooling someone while they’re in a delicate place.

However, even if that’s the case, there’s always things you can do to protect yourself.

An Example of a (Fairly) Convincing Scam

This week, I received an email from someone who claimed to represent Ferrari. You know, the sports car brand. That Ferrari.

They claimed they were looking for someone with my experience and encouraged me to apply.

For a split second, I was fooled. Not enough to fall for it completely, but enough to read the full email. It seemed professionally written and looked official. The link included in the email didn’t look fishy on first glance.

This is exactly what a scammer wants someone to think when they see these emails. They want you to be impressed, to short-circuit your critical thinking, and to click and go through the steps.

But after thinking about it for a few seconds, I wasn’t fooled, and I’ll tell you my process for how to identify hiring scams like this, and more.

Verify the job on the official website

When I received that email and took a look, two things came to mind, and curiosity took over. I like solving little mysteries like this.

First, there was no way Ferrari was reaching out to little old me. There was more to it than that.

Second, because I wanted to get to the bottom of it, I went to verify the job that they sent. I searched “Ferrari careers” on Google and went to their career page. There was no job available that the scammer was talking about. Obviously.

The most obvious way to tell if a job is fake is by looking it up on the employer’s own website.

Compare web links

I noticed something else while I was doing all of this.

The link provided in the email didn’t match Ferrari’s official career page. It certainly looked like it could have been real on first glance, but on a closer look, it definitely wasn’t.

When you’re doing your due diligence with scam emails, check the provided web links against official career pages.

What often happens is that scammers will use longer web links with more complicated wording. They will use combinations of words like “applytoday” or “nowcareers” to hide in plain sight. Looks official, but on closer inspection, it isn’t.

Most official websites, especially big corporations like Ferrari, will have career page links that look like this: website.com/careers. Or this: jobs.website.com. Single-words separated by slashes.

Our own job board looks like that second one: https://jobs.tempstarstaffing.com.

Verify provided names

This hiring scam from Ferrari was signed by “Carlos”, who claimed to be the Chief Human Resources Officer.

Of course, I already knew that the job wasn’t real, and “Carlos” most likely wasn’t a real person, either. But I was curious, as always! So, I opened Google and did some research.

As I guessed, the Chief Human Resources Officer of Ferrari in Italy isn’t named “Carlos”. The real CHRO of Ferrari is named Michele Antoniazzi.

Thankfully, the scammer used a fake name to make identifying the scam much easier.

Look for ‘web scraping’

Just for fun, I decided to follow the scam link from “Ferrari” to take a look.

(I don’t recommend doing this if you’re not used to dealing with scammers and their links)

To my surprise, the site that they’d made was a very, very convincing duplicate of Ferrari’s own website. The images, content, links, text, etc. was exactly the same, except for some mismatched font sizes.

This is when a scammer has used a “web scraper”, sometimes also called a “site scraper,” to pull unprotected HTML data from a website. They grab all of the metadata they can and construct a copy of it to make it look like the original.

Web scraping is, thankfully, not a 100% copy. There are usually obvious, and less obvious, differences between the copy and the original. Site scrapers sometimes make mistakes with font sizes and image resolution that you’ll be able to notice if you look hard enough.

If you do find yourself on one of these sites though, exit immediately!

Ultimately, does it make sense?

I mentioned earlier that my first clue about the scam email was that it claimed to come from Ferrari.

I asked myself why Ferrari would be emailing me about a job in the first place.

Ferrari is a multi-national luxury car company. I’m just a guy who works for a south-central PA staffing agency. It doesn’t make much sense, when you get right down to it!

Always ask yourself if it’s believable or makes sense. Out-of-the-blue emails from international corporations don’t make sense, do they? Not saying it couldn’t happen, but it’s very unlikely for the average person.

When you’re job searching, make sure to protect yourself from these kinds of scams. In the meantime, apply with Tempstar so that you can have a reliable source of work!