California Woman Warns of Facebook Job Scam

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[00:00:02] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.

[00:00:04] Dawn Furseth: It was initial feeling of being hopeful, and maybe seeing a light at the end of the tunnel after my contract was canceled and my friend basically let me down in a very large way. But I thought I'd be able to keep paying my bills. And everything came crashing down.

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[00:00:08] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.

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[00:00:14] Bob: Dawn Furseth spent several prime working years taking care of her aging mom, some great years truly. But when it came time to reenter the workforce as a 50-something woman, well we all know how tough it is to find a job right now, and how much tougher it is for older Americans. And so, after a couple of false starts facing a very large San Francisco area rent bill, Dawn took a chance on a new kind of job and it's left her with an even bigger problem than unemployment.

[00:00:47] Bob: Everyone knows San Francisco's expensive, they might not quite know how expensive, especially if you have three pets. Would you mind giving me a rough idea of how much your rent is?

[00:01:22] Dawn Furseth: How tragic it is?

[00:01:23] Bob: Yeah.

[00:01:24] Dawn Furseth: Right now I'm living in a 1900 sq. ft. home, renting. Drive time into San Francisco during commute hours is probably two hours each way. And the rent here is $3500.

[00:01:42] Bob: You pay 3500 a month and you commute four hours a day.

[00:01:45] Dawn Furseth: Correct.

[00:01:47] Bob: Wow.

[00:01:48] Dawn Furseth: Correct.

[00:01:49] Bob: A two-hour commute. Imagine that twice a day partly so she can provide a decent place for her pets. I got to meet them during our interview.

[00:02:00] Bob: Your dog's name is Grizzly?

[00:02:01] Dawn Furseth: Yeah, it's Grizzy. Yep.

[00:02:03] Bob: That's a great name.

[00:02:04] Dawn Furseth: He got thrown outside.

[00:02:06] Bob: (laughs) I'm sorry I didn't get to hear him. There's nothing wrong with barking. A little barking on a podcast never hurt anybody.

[00:02:11] Dawn Furseth: He woos because he's a Northern Breed.

[00:02:13] Bob: Oh my God, and you have two cats too, right?

[00:02:15] Dawn Furseth: I do. Phoenix and MJ.

[00:02:17] Bob: Who came first?

[00:02:20] Dawn Furseth: Sadly, they call came at about the same time.

[00:02:23] Bob: Wow.

[00:02:25] Bob: Now I know what you're thinking; why not just live somewhere less expensive. Let's talk about Dawn's career a bit.

[00:02:33] Bob: It seems like you've worked in and around the tech industry a lot of your life, is that right?

[00:02:37] Dawn Furseth: Sadly, yes.

[00:02:39] Bob: (chuckles) I started out thinking I wanted to be in marketing. And that just didn't appeal to me. And so I started a job at a clothing manufacturer's in production, and just naturally gravitated to the computer work. When somebody couldn't figure it out, it came like second nature to me. So started with that, then ended up...

[00:03:02] Bob: People figured it out very quickly by the way, Dawn's the one who can fix this.

[00:03:06] Dawn Furseth: They did. But I enjoyed it. But when I was going to school, I'm so old that there were no real good career paths in that area unless you wanted to be a programmer, which I did not. So I did some ins and outs, did some technical support, some consulting and training for a software company, and then ended up becoming a, what they call a sales engineer. So I'm the technical part of the sales team that sells software to companies. We hold the sales people honest. They don't oversell, hopefully. Sometimes they do, and then we get stuck, but yeah, and it's also about how can the software help the customer. How can it solve their business problems and pains? And that's where we really come into the picture.

[00:03:59] Bob: It's rather a listening job; it's kind of an empathetic job.

[00:04:03] Dawn Furseth: If people do it right, yes. You're absolutely correct.

[00:04:07] Bob: Yeah, we don't think about that in the tech industry, but of course a company, every company's unique and you buy a piece of software off the shelf, it doesn't really do what you need it to do and then you've got to somehow stretch each ends of that relationship to make it work. That's what you do, right?

[00:04:19] Dawn Furseth: Exactly right.

[00:04:21] Bob: And Dawn was doing pretty well when family and duty called.

[00:04:27] Dawn Furseth: So I had spent a couple of years, actually about three, stepping away from a day-to-day 9-5 and being a caretaker for my mother who had moved in with me. And that really became a full-time job. So I stepped away and just focused on her.

[00:04:46] Bob: Good for you. That's great you can do that actually it's a hard but wonderful thing you did.

[00:04:50] Dawn Furseth: Oh, and well I was the youngest sibling and the only girl, so it defaulted to me. But yeah, she moved in with me and passed away at home and didn't have to go live in a rest home, and her last years, I think, were as good as they could be.

[00:05:06] Bob: When that phase of her life changed, Dawn was ready to try something new and to try someplace new.

[00:05:14] Dawn Furseth: So then it became time for me to try and find another job. And I actually moved from the Bay Area at that time to Idaho because, I don't know, frankly the cost of living is quite a bit cheaper. And I then after my mother passed away, really didn't have any reason to stay here in the Bay Area just shelling out money. So I moved and about four months, I think, after I had moved there trying to figure out what I wanted to do and where the opportunities were, a friend of mine that I used to work with, she was actually a customer of mine when I worked at one of my software companies, got a hold of me and said, "Hey, are you still looking for a job?" And I said, "Well yes, I am." She said, "Get back to the Bay Area. We need you here." So I came back to the Bay Area...

[00:06:08] Bob: Back home with what seems like a great opportunity.

[00:06:13] Dawn Furseth: The company was doing some really interesting things around fraud waste and abuse in the healthcare space looking for bad actors, if you will, and the providers charging the payers ridiculous amounts of money for procedures they never performed, and the like. Unfortunately, that job and that company is having financial troubles, so they cut my contract short. And so I found myself again, last October, looking for a job again here in the Bay Area.

[00:06:48] Bob: That, that's a, so you moved back for this job and...

[00:06:51] Dawn Furseth: Correct.

[00:06:51] Bob: ... they cut you short. Oh man.

[00:06:52] Dawn Furseth: Correct.

[00:06:53] Bob: That's painful. How long had you been there?

[00:06:55] Dawn Furseth: About 10 months.

[00:06:57] Bob: Oh, wow, that's painful.

[00:06:59] Dawn Furseth: Uh, yeah. You're absolutely right. And I was quite lost, but I had, I had a cushion, I had some savings and I could figure it out.

[00:07:15] Bob: Dawn was figuring it out short term, but as time passes and that cushion starts to dry up, well she starts to expand her idea of what kind of job she'd be willing to take. She puts "open to work" on her LinkedIn page.

[00:07:31] Dawn Furseth: And you know how every once in a while, you get these random emails in your inbox saying, "Hey, this is a great opportunity for you - come work with us," sort of thing. Usually ignore them truthfully because I know how much spam is out there in the email world. And that was my career. I was in the software business, so I should be able to spot a scam. But one of them reached out to me and it just kind of spoke to me and I thought, well, I, I don't have anything else going on. I've got a pretty big rent bill I have to pay and survive, so let me try it out. Worst case, it doesn't work and I stop. And it was a work from home opportunity.

[00:08:23] Bob: So she writes back and learns a little bit more about the job.

[00:08:26] Dawn Furseth: So the premise of the job opportunity was they said that Facebook had developed for their marketing customers, people who wanted to put ads onto Facebook, all these different companies, they were testing a version of the platform that embedded artificial intelligence into the Facebook ad process to better position those ads so they would be more lucrative, a better return on the investment, higher clicks, higher eyeball views, and such. And all I had to do was load up some software and it was basically a development version of the Facebook we're all familiar with, download a couple of other things to connect me to the development team so I could get the latest development updates as they were being released, and two, three times a day, go through this process of placing an ad on the platform and then I would get paid a percentage.

[00:09:38] Bob: So Dawn figures what the heck, and she's hired. She's told...

[00:09:44] Dawn Furseth: "We have a kickoff call with the other new hires that are helping us with this day after tomorrow, go ahead and get on the call and we'll walk you through the process."

[00:09:59] Bob: How many people were in the meeting?

[00:10:01] Dawn Furseth: Oh, probably about 20-ish.

[00:10:04] Bob: Wow.

[00:10:05] Dawn Furseth: So we went through that. There was a gentleman who was leading the call who supposedly worked for the marketing department there at Facebook.

[00:10:20] Bob: Yeah, okay, so he says hello, how are you, this job is about what?

[00:10:25] Dawn Furseth: Ah, so explained that Facebook was looking to bring artificial intelligence into its ad platform environment. They needed to do some testing and they needed people to place those ads to see what the response was once they were out in the world testing.

[00:10:44] Bob: So she completes the training and is assigned a mentor named Tina.

[00:10:51] Dawn Furseth: Oh, so first of all what she said is, "Let me make sure that you understand what this really entails. Marketing is such and such..." I'm like, yeah, I know exactly what marketing is. Don't insult my intelligence here. Frankly, people come to the table, I'm sure, that didn't know anything, and I listened politely. So basically explained the land, and I said, yes, I understand return on investment for an ad placement, I get it, that we're trying to maximize that using artificial intelligence, using ClickPath, and transcend behaviors, being able to predict things better using an engine -- I get it. She's like, "Oh, okay, you're so smart."

[00:11:36] Bob: You're so smart, that feels good after a stretch of being unemployed. So Tina gets down to the nitty gritty of explaining how things really work, and the nitty gritty is a bit annoying.

[00:11:48] Dawn Furseth: Then the process became downloading the app, setting accounts up, setting all that stuff up, and it was painful. Um, quite convoluted with something that you don't expect to be hard. I went ahead and kept trying because I thought, maybe I can make a few dollars here.

[00:12:10] Bob: But there is one unexpected thing about this opportunity. The first set of ads, she'll have to buy them with her own money.

[00:12:20] Dawn Furseth: Okay, everything's installed, everything's connected properly. Now we need to start the ad process of here's what you need to do. You need to transfer this money via wire into a crypto platform and then we'll transfer it from the crypto platform into the Facebook development platform and environment.

[00:12:41] Bob: Had you ever used crypto before?

[00:12:43] Dawn Furseth: I had not. I stayed away from it from all, for all the reasons that people say you should. Uh...

[00:12:50] Bob: So did this make you feel a little weird when they asked for that?

[00:12:53] Dawn Furseth: Completely. Yeah, I felt like I was getting out over my skis, but again, I kept telling myself, you're, you're a smart person. You can do this. Be thoughtful. Be wise. Ask questions. And look for issues.

[00:13:13] Bob: How much money did they ask for at first?

[00:13:15] Dawn Furseth: Oh at first, the first buy in, I think, was like $5000. In that time I thought, okay, you have to put skin in the game to get anywhere. I get that. And my plan, of course, was to go ahead and put it in, run the ad, get the return out of it...

[00:13:39] Bob: As soon as the crypto clears, a couple of days later she starts placing ad.

[00:13:46] Bob: What kind of ads were these?

[00:13:47] Dawn Furseth: Largely around like gaming and they were targeting that gaming community, so they said.

[00:13:55] Bob: So download this game kind of things?

[00:13:57] Dawn Furseth: Right, or click for more information on it, the updates and maybe subscriptions to them theoretically. I'm not a gamer, so I didn't go through that process, but I was familiar enough to see some of the logos and knew they were real companies and had games out there, so I did know that portion of it.

[00:14:21] Bob: The software she downloaded keeps track of it all.

[00:14:25] Dawn Furseth: It would come back in the development platform and tell me that it was placed and it was running and that it was complete 'cause they only give it like a 90-second, 2-minute time window from placement to closing.

[00:14:40] Bob: And in real time, she can see how the ads are doing, and how much money she's making. It's as easy as looking at her own Facebook account.

[00:14:49] Dawn Furseth: Sure, so in the platform, like I said, in the dev platform vs. my personal instance, there were two additional tabs; one that had the ad content and notifications, the other one that connected to the customer service and showed the balance in my digital wallet. So there were two different ones that when I would go to my personal Facebook, I didn't see those options. So after the ad closed, I could go to my wallet and see that the money was there. And I think it started out as a 6% return on the amount you invested. And it would give you a lower threshold and an upper threshold; the more you'd invest, the more you would get in theory.

[00:15:41] Bob: So after a day or two your $5000 then looked like $5500? What did you see there?

[00:15:47] Dawn Furseth: No, I mean it went up slowly, incrementally, with the 6% a couple times a day. It wasn't that much to start with, but it increased. I thought, huh, okay, this is interesting.

[00:16:02] Bob: So she starts making money, slowly, but to make more money she'll have to invest a bit more.

[00:16:10] Bob: What was your second investment amount, or roughly?

[00:16:13] Dawn Furseth: I think the next one was about 17,000.

[00:16:17] Bob: Her account bolstered by this larger amount, Dawn is able to place more ads, and that seems to be working. On the other hand, letting her ad-buying balance fall, that seems risky.

[00:16:30] Dawn Furseth: Because if you stopped running ads, they considered you uninterested in the job anymore, and that was it. I didn't want to do that. I needed some sort of, I thought, income.

[00:16:46] Bob: So she repeats the transfer procedure several times during the next couple of weeks.

[00:16:51] Dawn Furseth: And I think there were probably four or five transfers in total that I made. I think the last one was $75,000.

[00:17:00] Bob: And each one a little bigger, I'm guessing, right?

[00:17:02] Dawn Furseth: Of course.

[00:17:04] Bob: Things seem to be going well. Her account shows a much bigger balance than what she's contributed, but everything isn't perfect. For one thing, Tina seems a bit odd.

[00:17:16] Dawn Furseth: Well she started saying, "Oh sweetie, you're doing so well. You're so smart. When you get all that money, because this is a really big ad, when you get all that money, what are you going to do with it?" I said, "I don't feel comfortable sharing that, and it's frankly none of your business."

[00:17:36] Bob: So it got more personal than what are you going to do with your money?

[00:17:38] Dawn Furseth: Oh yes. Oh yes.

[00:17:40] Bob: Can you give me an example?

[00:17:42] Dawn Furseth: Sure, she says, "Oh, you've got about a month left of doing this work and then you'll be able to move into a mentoring role. You'll make more money. You'll have to come and do some training, and then we can get together." Yeah, I don't want to.

[00:18:00] Bob: I mean did she ever say things like I love you or anything like that?

[00:18:02] Dawn Furseth: Oh yes, yes. And would call me sweetie.

[00:18:08] Bob: Ooh.

[00:18:09] Dawn Furseth: I'm like, yuck, no thank you.

[00:18:10] Bob: Like in a flirtatious sort of way?

[00:18:12] Dawn Furseth: I couldn't tell if it was flirtatious, which I don't think, or if it was a culture language difference.

[00:18:23] Bob: Oh, sure. Yeah. But still, way beyond what you would normally invite.

[00:18:29] Dawn Furseth: It was not professional, I'll put it that way. So that got my ire up.

[00:18:35] Bob: And there is one other worry; that most recent deposit of $75,000, Dawn has put just about every dollar she has into that ad placement tool.

[00:18:47] Dawn Furseth: So I got a point and there was one last rather lucrative ad that I was going to do that required me to basically dump all of my savings except for about $600 into the platform. I thought, my grand plan was to go ahead and run the ad, once it cleared and once it was paid out, pull out a portion of the money, put it back in my bank to revitalize that, and then keep a good chunk in the digital wallet on the platform so I could continue running ads.

[00:19:35] Bob: But ... despite that discomfort with her boss and her balance, it sure seems like her investment is paying off.

[00:19:43] Dawn Furseth: I to go the point where I was going to do this last big ad; my balance in my wallet was quite significant, and I thought, okay, I can take, I was going to try and take about 400,000 out, put it back into my bank.

[00:19:56] Bob: Wow. How much was the balance?

[00:19:59] Dawn Furseth: It was about 1.3 million.

[00:20:01] Bob: Wow, okay. Anyway, you had put $400,000 in at this point?

[00:20:07] Dawn Furseth: Uh, I think my total investment was about 200, but I was going to pull it out to basically increase my balance.

[00:20:18] Bob: But her plan to withdraw her cash hits a snag, a really big snag.

[00:20:24] Dawn Furseth: They didn't give me all the instructions, and so the crux of it became when I pulled the portion out, it wouldn't go into my bank. And so I got a hold of my mentor and I said, "What's going on?" She says, "Oh, you needed to pull the entire amount out, and then put the portion back that you wanted to reinvest." Because I didn't do it correctly, they locked and froze my assets, both what I had tried to pull out and the balance I was going to leave. So they froze everything.

[00:21:07] Bob: They froze everything; her account is locked. All her cash is tied up in that account.

[00:21:15] Dawn Furseth: And they said, "Okay, you give us a 20% payment against the balance in your digital wallet, and we will unfreeze the assets and you can have access to them again." Well that totaled out to be about $55,000, and as I mentioned a moment ago, I only ended up with $600 in my bank account after I made this last investment. There was no way I could come up with it.

[00:21:45] Bob: So when they tell you, oh no, you did this wrong...

[00:21:49] Dawn Furseth: Yes.

[00:21:49] Bob: They're going to lock your account.

[00:21:51] Dawn Furseth: Yes.

[00:21:51] Bob: You have to upload more money to unlock your account.

[00:21:54] Dawn Furseth: Yes.

[00:21:56] Bob: She's told she has to upload money to get her money, but she doesn't have any more money.

[00:22:03] Dawn Furseth: The mentor said, "Take a second mortgage against your house." I said, "I rent." "What about, you have a car right? Why don't you sell your car?" I said, "Not an option." "Why don't you take anything that's valuable and sell it to a pawn shop and then you can buy it back later." You have to be kidding me.

[00:22:27] Bob: You have to be kidding me, she says to herself as much as to Tina, and that's when things hit her.

[00:22:36] Dawn Furseth: So it was initial feeling of being hopeful, and maybe seeing a light at the end of the tunnel after my contract was canceled and my friend basically let me down in a very large way. But I thought I'd be able to keep paying my bills. And everything came crashing down.

[00:23:03] Bob: Everything comes crashing down. Dawn realizes that the company she thought she was working for doesn't exist. Tina is a liar, her money, it's all locked up, well somewhere, and she can't get at it. And that whole Facebook system she used to buy ads; it isn't worth the pixels it was displayed on.

[00:23:26] Bob: So they created a whole like second Facebook environment for you?

[00:23:30] Dawn Furseth: Correct.

[00:23:31] Bob: Wow.

[00:23:32] Dawn Furseth: A shadow, it was a shadow system.

[00:23:34] Bob: When you add all them up, how much money did you put in?

[00:23:38] Dawn Furseth: I lost, in total, $176,000. What ended up starting to happen, and this in total, truthfully, Bob, lasted about two months from end to end, when I started with them versus when I got completely wiped out.

[00:23:57] Bob: And now she's facing a scary reality.

[00:24:01] Dawn Furseth: Yeah, and with one income, it's always been risky. You know I had my nest egg, I had my savings, and I was doing okay.

[00:24:08] Bob: Yeah.

[00:24:09] Dawn Furseth: Until I wasn't.

[00:24:11] Bob: Oh, that's painful, yeah. And you're tell me that was basically all of your savings, right?

[00:24:16] Dawn Furseth: All but $600, yes.

[00:24:20] Bob: Gone. How, how did that feel?

[00:24:23] Dawn Furseth: Awful, after the fact, of course there were some really dark days.

[00:24:27] Bob: Yeah.

[00:24:27] Dawn Furseth: But oh boy, I might start crying.

[00:24:34] Bob: You take your time or whatever you want is fine.

[00:24:36] Dawn Furseth: It was really dark. It was really dark, because I have nobody in my life to help me. So I started thinking, gosh, what do I do? I can't move into a shelter, 'cause I had my pets. I didn't even have the money to get my dog back to his breeder. It took a lot of, boy, bad mornings getting back to a place where I thought, okay, we can recover. I don't know how, don't know yet. But so when I, I started calling all the agencies, right. And in the meantime, I, when I realized what was going on, of course, when they say your money is frozen, um, it was a pretty final realization.

[00:25:39] Bob: So she starts to figure out what to do next.

[00:25:43] Dawn Furseth: I stopped responding to the mentor, to Tina. She kept trying to get a hold of me. I'm like, no, I'm not responding to you anymore. This is not happening. So I started calling people like the, or agencies like the FBI. I did a police report. I did Better Business Bureau. I did the attorney general to try and report it but the problem is, there was no traceability on it. It wasn't like a physical address, the IP addresses, of course, I didn't have. I'm not even sure how much they could have proven with that because they could hide the IP address or the source behind all sorts of firewalls and redirects and everything else. So I knew I was pretty much out of luck.

[00:26:37] Bob: And so her last call is to a local reporter, 7 On Your Side's Stephanie Sierra, because Dawn wants others to avoid the scam she was a victim of.

[00:26:48] Dawn Furseth: I was pretty sure they couldn't do anything, but I wanted to get the word out there to others to be aware of this, which is why I'm doing this spot with you, Bob, is make people aware.

[00:27:03] Bob: Dawn had spent her whole career in tech, in fact her most recent job was working for a company that detected fraud, and yet she became a victim. As we say often at The Perfect Scam, anyone can be a victim.

[00:27:19] Dawn Furseth: It was quite sophisticated. I'm at least aware enough, of course, I think as most of the members are at AARP of things like the grandchildren scam where people will call up on the phone and then say, hey, your grandson or granddaughter is in trouble. I'm here to help, but I need some money. Can you wire it to me, or can you put it in my PayPal account or something like that, use Zelle. But this one went to such a different level of sophistication; I had no clue.

[00:27:53] Bob: What do you want people to remember when they hear your story?

[00:27:56] Dawn Furseth: Be careful. And if something seems interesting, talk to somebody about it. Run it by them. Say hey, I saw this, it looks interesting. It's, you know, peaked my curiosity. What do you think about it? I can't say 100% that if somebody did that for me, I wouldn't be in the same boat. I don't know. Unfortunately, I'm a bit stubborn, but at least having a sounding board because as I told Stephanie at 7 On Your Side, it, it takes a tribe these days to help us beat, or help each other beat these scammers and share these stories, because they're shifting and they're changing so quickly, that what we used to look for is no longer the way they're getting in anymore.

[00:28:54] Bob: You used to tell people watch for misspellings in those emails, ChatGPT can spit out these scam emails by the billions, right?

[00:29:01] Dawn Furseth: Yep, and those are still there, don't get me wrong but the next level of sophistication is here, it's running rampant. And I dare say that next year or even later this year we're going to see a whole other level of sophistication.

[00:29:17] Bob: And people are going to want to know how are you?

[00:29:22] Dawn Furseth: (sigh) Boy, I appreciate the question. I'm getting by. My aunt, who's 101 years old by the way, is lending me some money to get at least some of my, my rent and my car payment paid each month. So it's scraping right now. I'm in the middle of searching for another job. Oddly enough I am leveraging ChatGPT for some coaching and guidance. It has been tremendous. But as you say, I'm even applying to like Safeway or Walmart, and I can't get hired there either. I don't know what I'm going to do.

[00:30:11] Bob: Thank God for your aunt.

[00:30:13] Dawn Furseth: Yeah, but she's not going to be around that much longer. And you know that money will eventually need to be paid back, somehow, to her son or whatever, but that's not today's decision.

[00:30:27] Bob: But I'm so glad that you have a houseful of pets to give you the love that you need when you're in the middle of all this.

[00:30:32] Dawn Furseth: If they would stay away from my bladder during the night, I would be happy.

[00:30:37] Bob: (laughs) That's the challenge.

[00:30:41] Dawn Furseth: I feel like the cat with nine lives.

[00:30:44] Bob: (laughs)

[00:30:44] Dawn Furseth: I'm on number nine.

[00:30:47] Bob: I think the cat has more than nine lives.

[00:30:49] Dawn Furseth: Ah, I'm going to stretch it, that's for sure.

[00:30:53] Bob: Getting the word out is really important when it comes to job scams because people looking for jobs are really vulnerable. They have to do things we normally tell people not to do; share personal information and think resumes or direct deposits setup. And they have to take leaps of faith. To help us get the word out and to learn more about avoiding work at home scams, we have Keith Spencer here today. He's a career expert at a company named FlexJobs which specializes in remote and online job postings.

[00:31:28] Keith Spencer: Dawn's story is a pretty tragic example of how scammers are becoming more sophisticated. She was clearly involved in a pretty complicated system. They were mimicking her actual Facebook page and its functionality. And I think it's very indicative of how far scams have come, especially with the emergence of AI over the last few years. The tactics and resources that scammers have available to them are becoming way more advanced, and that makes it so much harder to be vigilant and to identify scams before falling victim. Like Dawn had even shared, she worked in software her whole career and this, this scam was just sophisticated enough that it was still able to appear legitimate to someone who has a keener eye than most like Dawn.

[00:32:21] Bob: It was incredible to me the detail that they created this essential whole environment that she was placing ads in and getting the scoreboard of how her work was doing and all of that, it seems like a lot of software development even. There's a lot of work to pull that off.

[00:32:35] Keith Spencer: Yeah, no, absolutely, but with the tools, like I said, that scammers have available to them, even though to, to you or I it might seem like a lot of work to pull that off, it's becoming increasingly easy unfortunately for scammers to be able to you know replicate legitimate companies and pose as legitimate employers.

[00:32:56] Bob: Yeah, and but it is astonishing to think about the effort that was put into the scam that Dawn was a victim of. It seems to me like it was a ton of work, but you're telling me it actually isn't that much work now because the tools automate these processes for the criminals. That's scary.

[00:33:11] Keith Spencer: Yeah, and but you also hear the horror stories or see the reports on organizations that have maybe established themselves where that's all they do is try to scam people often in other countries. They sometimes have the resources to, to invest in the, the people power and the technology to employ really believable tactics.

[00:33:33] Bob: One of the things about Dawn's specific scam that I feel like we're seeing in a lot of different scam universes, but I'll bet it's true in job scams, is the kind of gamification of what happened to her. In this case it was Facebook ads, but I don't know that that mechanism mattered so much as it was almost like gambling, right. You put a little money in, you get a little extra money, then you get to another level, you've got to even put more money in, and, and that's the way they string you along over the course of weeks and months. Is, is gamification a part of this right now?

[00:34:01] Keith Spencer: Yeah, absolutely, that's a pretty common tactic. They provide you that easy income for simple, online tasks, and sometimes it, it builds. So they'll give you that small initial payment, and then they start to get a little bit bigger, and you start to think okay, this is legitimate. This is real. But then they might require a fee or sensitive information for some of those higher level or kind of premium tasks and that's where they then get their payout from you, and then they disappear.

[00:34:30] Bob: As we've mentioned, job seekers are particularly vulnerable, especially when it's tough to find a job. I asked Keith how much of a role that plays in job scams.

[00:34:41] Keith Spencer: So I think the job market plays a huge role in these scams and it's why job scams are so prevalent, because these scammers know that they have this quite large pool of potential victims who are feeling some of that desperation, feeling some of the frustration from how difficult the job search can be in general, and so when you have a vulnerable population like that, they are often more likely to fall victim of a scam.

[00:35:11] Bob: We've talked about the particular struggles that older job seekers face, but in truth, people of any age can be targeted.

[00:35:21] Keith Spencer: Scammers find the most success often with people who have not job searched for a while, or people who are job searching in a new environment like looking for remote jobs when they've worked in person their whole career because they might not understand what a legitimate process looks like. They let their guard down a little bit. They are more willing to share some of that personal information. Something that seems too good to be true might sound like it could be realistic. Those things are always in play for scammers.

[00:35:51] Bob: I think that's a really interesting point and I hadn't considered that this might be someone's first remote or flexible job in their career. And so if a criminal says, this is how we do it in the flexible job world, they might say, I wouldn't know any better so sure, that's part of the problem.

[00:36:05] Keith Spencer: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:36:07] Bob: In fact, Keith says, young searchers have their own struggles.

[00:36:11] Keith Spencer: And you know it's interesting that actually early career professionals are one of the largest demographics that fall victims to scams, because they don't know what a legitimate hiring process looks like because they haven't been in the job market that long. But same thing goes for people who have been in their career for a long time, but are making a change for the first time in 10, 15, 20 years, and are unfamiliar with what a current job search looks like.

[00:36:39] Bob: And I think that would be news to people. A lot of folks think old people fall for scams. But you're telling me that people who are new entrants to the job market are particularly vulnerable. Can you talk about that just a little bit more?

[00:36:50] Keith Spencer: Yeah, it's interesting. I actually had a conversation with the, the Better Business Bureau a year or two ago. They had a victim of a scam and she was very young; it was her first job right out of college, fell victim to what essentially amounted to a check cashing scam. They were telling her that you are going to, you're going to cash this check in your bank account to buy your equipment for this job that we just hired you for, and she was not able to identify the red flags because it was her first job out of school and had no idea what those red flags would even be. And that's part of why I, I really appreciate and respect what Dawn's doing in sharing her story because I think there are a lot of lessons for people at all ages or ages and stages of their career to learn from.

[00:37:36] Bob: On the one hand, job scams tend to boil down to one simple proposition; the criminal asks for money before the victim ever gets a traditional paycheck. On the other hand, the cover stories change constantly.

[00:37:52] Keith Spencer: I usually start by trying to tell people to keep in mind that scammers, at the end of the day, they want your money, right. So that can either come in the form of direct payments by tricking you to pay them in some way, shape, or form, or by gaining access to your sensitive personal information, your bank account information, your Social Security number, things like that that would allow them to then impersonate and steal from you later on. And fake companies or scammers posing as legitimate employers, they might get you to send some type of a direct payment, like in Dawn's case here, or they might be trying to get you to click a link or download a PDF or a VPN that ends up being malware so they can steal your information. You have a wide variety of phishing scams, again, associated with that, that downloading of malware. They might send you a link through email or text or messaging apps or even one that's on the rise now is they'll send you a calendar invitation and get you to click a link to join a, what you think is a meeting, and then you are downloading malware that gives them that backend access to your sensitive information. The, I touched on it just a moment ago, but fake VPNs, that is also a scam that's gaining in prevalence. A scammer might tell you that you need to download their specific VPN in order to complete your application, but then they get access to your desktop. And then also, we're seeing big rise in upfront fees or payment requests. They'll ask you to pay for an application fee or training cost, or purchase equipment or software, again, using your own money, in the case of Dawn, and then those are often combined with those check cashing schemes also.

[00:39:38] Bob: If you haven't been in the job market for a long time, it might be news to you that computers are doing the first level of screening resumes. When you apply for a job, the first interview might be conducted by artificial intelligence, and that opens a big door for scams.

[00:39:58] Keith Spencer: Another one that we're seeing a lot of is ATS compliant resume services, so ATS, that's an applicant tracking system. It's what a lot of employers use to post job postings, to collect applications, to even send out messages to invite people to interviews, things like that. But a lot of people only know the component of ATS in that it can scan and parse information from your resume. So a scammer posing as a legitimate employer might tell you like, oh, you know, apply for this job. You submit your application, it says, oh, our ATS can't read your resume, and it continues to reject your resume every time you attempt to apply. So then they tell you to contact a very specific resume service that will then, you know, you can pay for and will provide you with an ATS compliant resume, but then it turns out that the role never existed, the service, after you pay for it, it either never existed and ghosts you or just sends you back a copy of your resume that is not usable or serviceable in any way.

[00:41:05] Bob: So you're sending your resume out and you get a notice somehow or another that the resume's kicked back by the computer, but if you pay a little money to this other company, we'll fix that for you, and it's a scam. So these are people who don't have money to begin with, and now they're... oh, that's terrible. Oh my God.

[00:41:21] Keith Spencer: Yeah, that, that's one of the things that upsets me the most about these job scams is because this is such a vulnerable population. These are not people with lots of spare money to be risking out there on the job market. These are people who often are feeling those financial pressures starting to mount. They have maybe been out of work for a while and that stress is really building, and then they get scammed on top of it, and it just makes matters so much worse.

[00:41:52] Bob: But really, the message he wants to leave with you is, criminals are now going to extreme lengths to make their fake jobs appear real.

[00:42:02] Keith Spencer: I would say that the newest concern is the sophistication, because you can create a fake website that uses a legitimate company's name, that has a URL that is very close to that legitimate company's URL. You might even have paid to, to use a email domain that is very close to that legitimate company's email domain, um, so that's why those extra research steps are so important. Because if you're using a search engine, they, of course, have their own sophisticated algorithms, and you're looking for a legitimate company. Chances are really good that the first result or first few results that you find in that search engine will be the legitimate company if you search that company's name. If you then cross reference that with the company's different social media accounts or handles, that's going to add you that, or add in that extra layer of verification. Really, just because they are getting so sophisticated with their mimicry, if you will, those extra layers of verification have become so much more essential.

[00:43:09] Bob: Okay, so what are the red flags that people who are job hunting should look for a sign that something is wrong about something that they think they're applying for?

[00:43:18] Keith Spencer: Yeah, we alluded to some of them already, but I definitely think they, they all bear re--, repeating. Any request for upfront payments, that's a big one. Legitimate employers are not going to ask you to pay to apply for a job, or pay for training or equipment or background checks from your own funds before you start working. Other red flags, looking for vague or inconsistent job descriptions. If the job description is unclear or overly broad, or seems too good to be true, that's the bread and butter of scammers that, that offering something that is so good you can't pass it up. If they're offering that, but then avoid, avoiding giving concrete details, that can be a big red flag. Unprofessional communication. This one's becoming a little more rare with AI because AI can handle your communication for you, but you still want to keep an eye out for poor grammar, misspelled emails, really generic greetings, things like that. But then also unprofessional channels that you're speaking to. So in Dawn's case, the vast majority of her communication was happening through WhatsApp, and that's, it might seem like something that could be a bit common, but really, legitimate, established employers, they're going to be using their own professional modes of communication and emailing you using their company email domain. Another red flag Dawn encountered later on in her scam was she was getting pressured to, to make decisions quickly or to act fast. Scammers want to confuse you. They want you to feel that pressure so that your, your rationale and your logical thinking goes out the window, so that's a pretty common red flag to keep an eye out for. Like those requests for upfront payments, requests for sensitive personal information, you touched on a little bit earlier, Bob, employers do need some sensitive personal information from you, for example, they need your bank account information in order to set up your direct deposit, but those things come much later in the process after you have received and signed an official offer, and there's been an onboarding process. And usually a legitimate company's going to collect that information through some type of secure service, DocuSign for example, is a pretty popular one. Unsolicited job offers like Dawn received, it's not entirely uncommon for a recruiter to reach out and say, hey, you seem like you would be a good fit for this role based on maybe your LinkedIn profile or resume you had posted online. That's an instance where you would really want to slow things down and make sure you're asking questions; what company are they from? Don't just go clicking on links that they're sending you via direct messenger, or anything like that. You want to make sure that you're doing your due diligence, trying to find their actual like hiring page. Verify that the role is open on their hiring page, and apply through it through their actual company career's page. Another red flag that I'll mention are some irregularities in the interview process, which was something that Dawn experienced as well. There was one sort of phone conversation and then everything switched to WhatsApp, but a legitimate process typically you might have that phone screen initially, but even with remote rolls, you're going to have, you know, multiple rounds of interviews with video conferencing platforms, you're going to meet multiple people. You'll be able to put names to faces. Just that one phone screen and then immediately jumping to WhatsApp, in hindsight, I think Dawn would agree that's probably a pretty big red flag.

[00:46:58] Bob: As we're talking, it striking me that AI is probably playing an important role in this in a couple of different ways, but I want to talk about this first. If you haven't been looking for a job in the last couple of years, the whole idea of a computer reviewing your resume before you even get to a human being is going to be brand new, and the kind of, maybe I'm stretching here, but the, I think everyone has a natural sort of shock to find out that's one of the barriers you have to go through with a computer when you're applying for a job. But so the coldness of that seems to me to make people even more vulnerable to say the coldness of a criminal. It makes, it's what legitimate companies do and what criminals do are like coming together, the distance between them is less because of the use of AI by these companies? What do you think about that?

[00:47:43] Keith Spencer: Yeah, I certainly think that's sort of a reasonable assessment to make there. When you have so many parts of the process are becoming automated, and there's less human-to- human interaction, um, when you get a, a scammer reaching out to you and it is a real human, and they are being uh kind and encouraging, um, that's going to, it's going to increase the likelihood that you'll be letting your guard down.

[00:48:09] Bob: Thank God I've sent out 100 resumes, no one's responded. Finally someone's responding, right?

[00:48:14] Keith Spencer: Exactly, exactly.

[00:48:14] Bob: Yeah.

[00:48:16] Bob: Remember, Dawn put "open to work" on her LinkedIn profile, a normal and often helpful thing to do, but it does signal to criminals that you are receptive to communications from a stranger. So it's really important to treat these unsolicited, unexpected messages very carefully. What else should job seekers do to protect themselves?

[00:48:39] Keith Spencer: It is hard because there are so many different methods and the job search process itself is evolving nearly constantly. I would say, you want to, if you are job searching, there is no harm in putting out the word to your network, or maybe having that "open to work" banner on your LinkedIn profile, although people have mixed feelings about that. But if someone reaches out to you in an unsolicited manner, slow things down. Always be willing to slow things down. A legitimate employer is going to give you time to ask questions, to verify details, you, if you're being pressured, if someone's saying, you need to act fast, you need to click this link, that should send up your alarm beacons. But then in terms of just the job search in general, you want to make sure that you are using trusted platforms to search. As I mentioned earlier, not all platforms are verifying and vetting the postings on their site, so you do want to be careful how much trust you are putting into the postings that you find on different job search sites. I usually recommend to people, when you find a job that looks appealing to you, note on that job search site, the company name, the title of the job, whatever information they're giving, and then jump to your, your search engine of choice and look for that company's actual careers page and try to find the posting on there. Because it is almost always safer to apply for a job through a company's actual careers page than through a third-party website. But regardless, searching on thirty--, third-party websites, it's unavoidable in today's job search, so just make sure that you're using some trusted platforms, you're using your judgment when you're looking for those red flags, things like that. And then making sure that you're doing your research; researching the company further before you're engaging, somebody reaches out to you, you want to verify that they actually work for that company, so search their name on the company website, uh, search for them on LinkedIn, check their, uh email domain. Does it match the company's official domain, things like that. Review companies on different review websites out there like Glass Door, I'm sure everybody's pretty familiar with. But just those extra steps for verification, that can really, it takes a little bit of extra time on the initial stages, but it can save you a lot of strife on the back end.

[00:51:11] Bob: And here's one specific suggestion Keith had that was new to me, and I found it really helpful.

[00:51:17] Keith Spencer: It's safer to create a specific email address that you use just for job searching.

[00:51:24] Bob: Hmm, that's interesting, yeah.

[00:51:24] Keith Spencer: So that if a scammer finds your information, personal email is not compromised in any way. But you just...

[00:51:31] Bob: So Bob Sullivanislookingforajob@gmail.com or something.

[00:51:34] Keith Spencer: Yeah, absolutely, or bobsullivan with just a couple of numbers added to it or something like that, that you use just for job searching. I do that myself when I'm job searching. And also, it's useful for you in other ways because it helps you track and keep an eye on the opportunities that are potentially coming across your radar.

[00:51:52] Bob: Yeah, that's a really good idea. And also, when you're applying for hundreds of jobs, you forget, obviously sometimes, right, what you're doing, so it's good to have that.

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[00:52:03] Bob: In the end, there is one pretty iron-clad rule of thumb. When you get a job, you should never be the first one to pay. The employer is supposed to pay you. If you're asked for money, in any form, no matter how slick the website or how long the interview process, end communication and go back to your job search. For The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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[00:52:33] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you're not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next. Our email address at The Perfect Scam is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org, and we want to hear from you. If you've been the victim of a scam or you know someone who has, and you'd like us to tell their story, write to us. That address again is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Associate Producer, Annalea Embree; Researcher, Becky Dodson; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; and our Audio Engineer and Sound Designer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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