How to avoid and recognise remote work or WFH scams?

Last updated on 30 August 2022

The goal of scammers is to take something from you that you are not willing to give. It might be your phone number, your personal details and email address or your money. They try to not let you see what they really want and how they are going to get you to give it to them. To find a remote job, it is important to recognise scams and avoid them. So that you will not waste time, energy and or money on scammers. And you will stay motivated to get hired for your first remote job.

Note: This page is still under construction. (24-8-2022)

With remote work becoming more popular also with the help of the pandemic, work from home scams also are becoming more popular. A regular job scam is practically impossible because you have to visit the company in person. Because the remote job hiring process is all virtual, anyone can pretend to be from any company.

Scammers often target people that have a job right now promising that you can do a remote job besides your normal job. Anyone with a job can pay for the fees that the scammer wants to take from you. Even if they are targeting your bank account or credit card information, this will have funds that can be stolen.

Executive summary:

Avoid wasting time, energy and money by avoiding scammers.

Here are the steps to prevent being scammed:

Does the hiring manager or recruiter allow you to connect by LinkedIn? (No means red flag)

Is the job posted on FaceBook, Telegram or other free anyone can post platforms? (Yes means red flag)

Is the recruiter or Hiring manager emailing you from [email protected]? (No means red flag)

Are you being contacted only through WhatsApp or some phone number calling? (Yes means red flag)

Is the salary compared to your experience and skills the correct value? (High salary with no experience is a red flag)

Are there obvious spelling or grammar mistakes in the job description? (Yes red flag)

Scammers play on your greed to get you to give them what they want. The “get rich quick scam” is the oldest on the internet.

Always make sure that you get emails from [email protected] No WhatsApp only, NO facebook or LinkedIn messenger and NO Gmail or other free services email addresses.

Tip: Search for “remote work” instead of “Work online” or “Work from home”. Remote jobs or fully remote are not often used by scammers.

What are the criteria, what experience and what skills or talent is the company looking for for the job?

Remote work scams have no real requirements, or criteria and no experience needed.

Where do you give your information?

When looking for a job you should use a professional email address like [email protected] instead of [email protected] And you need to keep an eye on incoming emails so you can not use a fake email address that you normally use to get free crappy “ebooks”. So you need to be careful when and where you give out this email address.

Diversion to mislead you

You started out looking for remote work, got sidetracked to work online and ended up “investing” in crypto. Scammers try to step by step take you away from your goal and move you to where they want you. When you are looking for remote work, check often if you are still on the right track during your WFH job search. The steps from “work online” or “work from home” to make an investment or buy Crypto is much easier than from “Remote work”. Any normal job does not require you to make any investments, you give your time and perform tasks and you get money at the end of the month.

This is the golden rule: Never give money to someone that you never met in person. Guaranteed that you will never be scammed in your life.

We have some pages that can help you find a legit and reliable remote job here:

Here is the Rem0tework.com list of 38 Free job-boards with 3.552.568 remote jobs.

Remote hiring companies on LinkedIn right now. (P1/4)

Work from home (wfh) or work from anywhere (WFA) hiring companies. (P2/4)

The biggest remote first company list (P3/4).

Virtual first and remote friendly company list. (P4/4)

No real requirements, criteria or no experience are needed to get the WFH job.

Scammers are using a funnel technique meaning that they wish to get as many potential remote work scam victims as possible. Then slowly step by step they will try to move you further. This means that there are no real requirements for online work scam jobs. For example, the age range is “18 to 65 years old”, and you can work with your mobile phone. This means the whole population roughly right? Have you ever heard of anyone making a good income just by mobile phone?

No selection criteria, have a look at this “Work from Home”job advertisement:

It was on FaceBook, scamming platform number one. No experience? No worries. This person or company offering this “remote job”

It looks like many groups on FaceBook are created with the specific intention to scam and mislead people that join them. To prevent this, we created this page and promote it often in those groups.

Bad grammar and bad spelling

Entrepreneur is a difficult word but if you type just 20 words, you should get all of them right!

This person did not even really write whole sentences so checking the grammar is not possible.

Realistic salary for a starter remote job

Let’s make a roughly estimated, average salary in the US and Europe for basic education and no-experience jobs.
This will be between 8 and 12 USD or Euro per hour, 1280 – 1920 Gross per month full time rounded 15.000 to 23.000 per year.
Anyone that promises to pay seriously more than 15-23K is trying to scam you for sure.
Full-time means 40+ hours a bit more per week, 170 hours a month, it is practically impossible to earn a good salary working just a few hours a day. For a company to make money, they need to pay their employees a low salary while they create a lot of value so that the company makes a lot of profit.

This is clearly a fake remote job offer but a great example of remote work scams:

Using your smartphone while working 2 to 3 hours a day you can make 26.000 to 50.000 USD per month???? Use your instinct and gut feeling, does it seem too good to be true? Then it usually is!!!

Maybe a bit less obvious is:

That post has lead to this conversation:

This person was suggesting in 7 days your money could become 10 times more:

No need to have any knowledge of Bitcoin or Crypto at all. 😕

While exactly at that moment (1-7-2022) bitcoin had a huge crash:

The EU has finally decided to limit cryptocurrencies around that same date.

This person tried to get me to create an account here.

For this kind of research, we use Temp Mail to generate an email address just for an hour or so. You can use this temp email to get free ebooks without signing up for email lists also.

They even ask you for your Bitcoin Account, very dangerous!!!

Interesting that a financial investment account does not even send an email confirmation!

We created a test account just to see.

The account page looks okay, believable.

Interesting that you can login without any verification by phone number, email or other two step authentication. That would mean that you can redraw money and make transfers also without any second verification method like email or SMS.

We assume that you will see amazing results and your money increase a lot but by the time you are allowed to redraw the money or when you try to, that it will not work. You can no longer login, your account is removed, unreachable and so on.

We started a chat and this was the conversation:

Any financial institution needs a permit to handle money and manage bank accounts. It is clear that these scammers use Bitcoin to avoid getting in trouble. Also bitcoin can hardly be traced so when they take your money and all of a sudden you no longer can access your account and the bitcoin funds are lost, you can never trace who has taken your money.

Here Is another example of a possible scam conversation:

We do everything possible to stop these scammers so we used ICANN lookup to find out more about this fake scammers website. We found the hosting company and send an email to the abuse department requesting that this website will be taken offline because of scamming. There was no chat possibility for the abuse and legal department, unfortunately. So far we have not received a response yet. We will update here if we get a response or if the scammer’s website is taken offline. We do not like scammers and we try our best to help as many people as possible to find a real and reliable remote job. With hostingchecker.com you can also find out where a website is hosted.

Rem0tework.com tip: Be careful when a recruiter or hiring manager asks to communicate through WhatsApp or by calling. By giving your real phone number, they can post your number online or hand it over to other scammers. You can also be called or messaged without your permission. Better communicate by email and video meetings. It is easy to buy a prepaid sim card and register a WhatsApp account that can not be traced to anyone.

Here is an example of a scam conversation:

Rem0tework.com tip: Ask to connect through LinkedIn with the profile of the recruiter or hiring manager. Anyone with a professional career for a company and also recruiters that are not directly connected to a company will have a LinkedIn profile where you can see their connections and that they work for that company.

Scamming by showing you a “real” bank account in your name with a lot of money on it. But you just have to pay a few thousand euros to get it. And the 5.000 becomes 10.000 and so on and at the end of course you never really get that money. It is a shame that instead of helping people and creating value, some people choose to put time, energy and money into scamming.

How scammers get you to do what they want

Scammers use your wish to get out of your nine-to-five office job as leverage to get you to fall for their scam. Work from anywhere, flexible working hours and great salaries are used to motivate you to follow the remote work scam steps and fall for their tricks.

Rem0tework.com tip: “Work from Home” and “Work Online” are often used to try and scam you instead of remote work.

Rem0tework.com tip: Never give out personal information like your address or bank account number until you have received a concept contract for a (remote) job. The concept remote job contract can be made with “here are your personal details going to be” so no need to provide your details until you have received that contract.