Dan was in desperate need of a steady job. After a year of job hunting, he had been surviving on part-time hours in events and was even homeless, sleeping on his friends' couches. When the job offer came, he thought it was a lifeline. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a recruitment scam.
From the employer's perspective, Dan was the perfect candidate, desperate and not asking too many questions. That's what they looked for because when he started, that's who he was told to hire. The scam that got Dan was a multi-pronged attack.
First, the new "employer" told him he'd need to pay for an HR qualification with the promise of reimbursement as he completed the modules. Dan was assured he'd have a job and a monthly income. The cost was a few hundred pounds, and he paid £275 to what looked like an external training provider and logged in for his first day.
He was then told he would be recruiting people. All he needed to do was buy a burner phone and shell out £118 for a job board CV subscription. The first person he called was "just some woman who was trying to find a job as well, just as desperately as I was."
When Dan read the script and remembered the way he was interviewed, he knew he was part of a scam. He was now a scammer, and he didn't want to walk away without getting refunded, even though he spent a lot of money he didn't want to spend.
Dan is one of a growing number of people falling victim to recruitment scams in the UK. These scams are not new, but they have picked up during the pandemic as people lost their jobs, and recruitment moved online. As the cost of living crisis deepens, more people are being scammed.
The Cyber Helpline, a charity helping victims of cybercrime, has seen a 286% increase in job scams over the last nine months compared with the whole 12 months before that. New research commissioned by Ofcom revealed that 30% of adults in the UK have experienced some kind of employment scam.
Job scams hand criminals the tools to hurt their victims more than once. Rory Innes, the CEO of The Cyber Helpline, explained, "Think about what's valuable to criminals - money and information about individuals. Job fraud's perfect because you can get someone to send you a CV and their passport details and pretend to do a DBS check or criminal record check and then you scam them out of money, so you've made the money, you've also got all the data which you can then use or sell for other scams."
Some scammers exploit people again once they've been found out. They phone up, pretend to be the police, and say, "Look, we know you've been scammed by this fake company. If you need to put your money into a safe account or if you give us a deposit, we will go and help and recover your money," and then they get scammed again. People often lose more in these recovery scams than they do in the original scam, particularly if they're tricked into handing over their bank details.
The amount of money people lose through job scams varies widely. Some are scammed out of a few hundred pounds, while others lose thousands, even tens of thousands of pounds. But the impact is more than financial. People's mental health is affected, and their ability to trust is eroded.
Maya, who also fell victim to a job scam, said, "When it all went down, I was crying hysterically, not because I've lost out on the money, they can keep the money. It's the fact that I don't have a job… You need a job, especially in London."