Job scam red flags: the 12 patterns we check for

A ghost job wastes your time; the employer is real. A scam costs you money or your identity; the employer is not. Treating them as one thing is the commonest mistake in this whole subject, and it is why this site has two separate checkers rather than one score.

The scale is not small. The US Federal Trade Commission put losses to job and business-opportunity scams at more than $500 million in 2023, and a job search is close to the ideal setting for one: people are hopeful, moving quickly, and used to being asked for personal details by strangers.

The twelve red flags

Roughly in the order they appear in confirmed cases. These are the exact patterns our scam job checker looks for, so the list below and the tool cannot drift apart.

1. Asked to pay for training, equipment or a background check. A legitimate employer never asks a candidate for money.
2. Sent a cheque and asked to forward part of it. This is the classic fake-cheque fraud. The cheque bounces after you have sent real money.
3. Recruiter writing from a personal email, not a company domain. Present in the large majority of confirmed job scams.
4. Interview or contact only over WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. These avoid a traceable, company-owned channel.
5. Asked for bank details, ID or a tax number before any offer. Payroll details come after a signed offer, never before an interview.
6. An offer within hours, with no real interview. Nobody hires this fast. Speed is used to stop you checking.
7. Pressure to decide now. Artificial deadlines exist to stop you researching the company.
8. Pay far above the market for the work described. A headline number doing the work an employer's reputation usually does.
9. Asked to buy equipment from a supplier they name. The supplier is usually the fraudster, and the money never comes back.
10. Payment or deposit in cryptocurrency. Irreversible by design, which is the point for whoever asked.
11. Addressed to nobody in particular. Weak on its own — a mass send is not a fraud. Counts only alongside something else.
12. Asked to receive and re-send packages. Re-shipping fraud. The goods are bought with stolen cards and you are the last link.

The four that decide on their own

Eight of the twelve are evidence to be weighed. Four are not, because they are facts rather than hints, and balancing them against “but the salary looks normal” would be false balance:

• Being asked to pay for training, equipment or a background check. A legitimate employer never asks a candidate for money. There is no exception to this one worth learning.
• Being sent a cheque and asked to forward part of it. The classic fake-cheque fraud. Your bank credits it, you send real money, and the cheque bounces a week later leaving you liable for all of it.
• Being asked for bank details, ID or a tax number before any offer exists. Payroll details come after a signed offer. Nothing about a first conversation requires your account number or a scan of your passport.
• Being asked to receive and re-send packages. Re-shipping fraud. The goods were bought with stolen cards and you are the last traceable link in the chain.

Any one of these ends the conversation. The other eight — a free-mail recruiter, an interview held only on WhatsApp or Telegram, an offer within hours, artificial urgency, implausible pay, a named supplier you must buy from, cryptocurrency, a greeting addressed to nobody — are each survivable alone and damning together.

Why three levels and not a score

The checker answers “nothing matched”, “worth checking” or “high risk”, and never gives you a number out of a hundred. That is a deliberate refusal.

Twelve patterns matched against one message cannot meaningfully distinguish a 61 from a 68. Printing one would borrow a precision the method has not earned, and precision is exactly what a person deciding whether to send their passport should not be given falsely. “Two things here look wrong” is both more honest and more useful.

The rules are simple enough to state in full: any one of the four decisive flags, or any three flags at all, gives high risk. One or two gives worth checking. None gives nothing matched.

And “nothing matched” is never “safe”. It means none of the twelve patterns appeared in the text you pasted. Check the company independently before sharing anything — find their careers page by searching for it yourself, rather than following a link somebody sent you.

The check runs in your browser

Nothing you paste is sent anywhere. The patterns are in the page, the matching happens on your machine, and there is no request for us to log and no text for us to store.

That is partly a privacy decision and partly a design one. Every competing tool in this category leads with “AI-powered” and uploads your message to a server. Somebody pasting a recruiter message they are already worried about has had one unwelcome surprise already, and the tool should not be the second.

Why scams are rare on this board

Not by vigilance, but by construction. We crawl employers’ own applicant tracking systems — Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Ashby and more than twenty others — so a posting only reaches this board if somebody paid for an ATS tenancy and published it on their own careers infrastructure. That is a high bar for a fraudster and a trivial one for a real employer.

Compare that with a site where anyone can post a listing, or with a direct message arriving in your inbox. The checker exists for those, because that is where this reaches people.

If you were targeted

• Send no money, no documents and no bank details, whatever the reason given.
• Stop replying. There is no version of this conversation that ends well, and engaging marks you as reachable.
• Report it to the platform you received it on, and to your national fraud reporting service.
• If you have already sent money, tell your bank straight away — same day matters more than anything else you do.
• If they used a real company’s name, tell that company. They will want to know, and their security team may already be tracking it.

Check a message, or check a posting

Paste a recruiter message into the scam job checker if you are worried the employer is not real. If the company is real but nobody ever replies, that is the other problem — start with eight checks before you apply, or paste the link into the ghost job checker.