Scammers are trying to steal job seekers’ money and personal information through phishing campaigns using fake advertisements posted on recruitment platforms.
The warning was published today as a public service announcement (PSA) on the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).
“The FBI warns that malicious actors or ‘scammers’ continue to exploit security weaknesses on job recruitment websites to post fraudulent job postings in order to trick applicants into providing personal information or money,” the FBI says.
“These scammers lend credibility to their scheme by using legitimate information to imitate businesses, threatening reputational harm for the business and financial loss for the job seeker.”
Such scams have been around since early 2019, with average reported losses of almost $3,000 per victim besides the damage inflicted on victims’ credit scores.
The federal law enforcement agency issued a similar warning in January 2020, saying that cybercriminals also began spoofing legitimate companies’ sites to steal job applicants’ money and personally identifiable information (PII).
Crooks are taking advantage of the lack of strong security verification standards on recruitment websites to post fake job openings indistinguishable from those published by the companies they’re impersonating.
As BleepingComputer reported last year, anyone could have created job listings on behalf of almost any company on the LinkedIn recruitment platform without any…
