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There were clues from the start that it was too good to be true. A headhunter emailed me with a job prospect – a journalist role with “a leading US technology and markets editorial team”. The opportunity, she said, was part of a confidential expansion and hadn’t been publicly posted.

My spidey-sense was tingling, but the timing was auspicious. I was on the lookout for new work as my maternity leave was coming to an end. Initially, the email seemed legitimate. When I Googled the sender, I found a headhunter with the same name and profile picture on LinkedIn, and the message was clearly tailored to me: It referenced several roles I’d previously held and identified my specific areas of expertise. “Your focus on the real-world impacts of AI, digital culture and the gig economy aligns perfectly with an internal, high-priority mandate I’m managing,” the headhunter wrote.

I emailed back. The headhunter asked me to send over my CV, along with my salary expectations, preferred work structure (remote, hybrid, or on-site), and geographic flexibility. In return, she shared a more detailed job description. The role was, indeed, perfect for me. Too perfect – as if someone had put my CV into ChatGPT and asked it to create a job description based directly on my experience. It was located in the city in which I live and offered a hybrid working arrangement, just as I’d requested. The biggest tell: I’d been ambitious with my salary suggestion, but this was offering significantly more.

By this point I was fairly sure I was being taken for a ride, but I still couldn’t figure out the scam. I found myself trying to justify the anomalies. It’s an American company, and salaries are generally higher there, aren’t they? I asked about next steps. Then the headhunter gave me feedback. My CV undersold my leadership skills, she said; it needed refining. If I liked, she could connect me with a specialist who would make my profile more compelling. They would discuss pricing directly with me.

Ah, so that was it.

Against the backdrop of a particularly tough job market in the UK, recruitment scams are on the rise. Fraudsters use the promise of fake roles to trick jobseekers out of money or personal information (or both). Report Fraud, the UK’s national cybercrime reporting service, says it received more than twice as many reports of recruitment scams in 2024 compared with 2022. Lloyds Banking Group reported a 237% rise in job scams from January to August last year, and Monzo said more than 10,000 of its customers fell victim to such scams in 2025.

AI tools have made scamming much easier, says Keith Rosser, chair of JobsAware, a not-for-profit organisation that helps workers report scams. “You can sit nowadays anywhere in the world and run a large job scam against people in the UK,” he says. “It’s not very difficult, you’ve got a reasonable chance of success, and you’ve got a very low chance of being caught.”

In my case, I didn’t lose anything more than an hour’s time refining my CV and a bit of pride. But what if I were less experienced, less cynical, or simply more desperate?

Recruitment scams come in different forms. One of the most prevalent, known as a “task scam”, claims to offer the chance to make money by doing simple online activities, such as liking TikTok videos or reviewing products. These scammers often approach people over WhatsApp or social media with the promise of remote work, flexible hours and fast cash. Sometimes, they initially pay small amounts of money as promised, leading victims into a false sense of security that the arrangement is legitimate. They might then start asking for payments, for example claiming there is a fee to retrieve funds or to upgrade your account in order to earn more. In other cases, victims might find themselves drawn into illegal money laundering operations, with criminals paying money into their bank account and asking them to transfer it onwards minus a commission.

Task scams tend to particularly target young people; students, for example, looking for work. Others, such as the CV scam that targeted me, go after workers in more senior positions – and are more bespoke. Often, they will impersonate a real recruiter or employer; recruiters have reported their LinkedIn profiles being cloned by people who then message jobseekers using their details.

After enticing applicants with a role, the scammers will ask for money under a variety of guises. In my case, they said it was to improve my CV – and hinted heavily that this was necessary if I wanted a shot at the lucrative role dangled in front of me. Other scammers might say it’s to pay for training, or for equipment or travel costs the employer will later reimburse. The government’s Disclosure and Barring Service has reported scams asking for money to cover fake DBS checks. In some cases, fraudsters specifically target jobseekers abroad and ask for money to cover visa costs.

“We’ve heard of people who have had job interviews where the interview itself has been a scam,” says Lisa Webb, consumer law expert at Which?. “You’re asked to phone a number to have your interview, and that phone number is a premium-rate line, so you’re actually paying.”

Even if no money changes hands, scams can be a way to mine victims’ data. Posing as a fake employer gives scammers the cover to get bank details or passport information. “You can have your identity cloned,” says Webb. “People can end up taking loans or credit cards out in your name; you can end up having your own banking impacted.”

When I received the first email from my “headhunter”, I was drawn in by how professional and customised it seemed. The writing was of a good standard and the sender was clearly familiar with my profile. It felt personal. Even five years ago, says Rosser, you could often spot a scam just by looking at the grammar. “But they’re so clever now.”

“The growing accessibility of AI means that criminals have way more leverage than they ever did before,” Webb says. “They can produce these scams much faster. They can make them more relevant, and there’s a much higher level of sophistication.”

Oleksandra Lietova, head of marketing at educational platform Ratatype, has noticed this shift. She used to receive job offers that were obviously fake: the messages would be vague and the jobs would be unrelated to her line of work. But recently she received a string of emails that seemed more authentic. They appeared to be from recognisable companies – Burberry, Ernst & Young, Google, Meta – and used the real company logos. But on closer inspection, she noticed the senders’ addresses didn’t use the proper company format and the emails contained dodgy links.

She shared screenshots online to warn others. “When you open an email where it says, ‘Hi, we are from Google, we have some job opportunities for you,’ you think for just a second, ‘Wow, this is it. Finally, I did it,’” she says.

It’s exactly this psychological desire that recruitment scams abuse, says Rosser. “A lot of people feel as if they’ve been found, almost – ‘Somebody wants me!’” he says.

As with all fraud, recruitment scams prey on vulnerability, says Linda Homewood, fraud and scams ambassador at UK charity the Cyber Helpline. With the UK unemployment rate at a five-year high and the US experiencing the weakest year for job growth since the pandemic, many jobseekers globally are desperate, which can make them prime targets.

Seattle-based Candice Jackson, who works in customer support for tech and healthcare, found this out after she lost her job in 2023. She struggled to find a position at a similar level and started getting into financial difficulty. Her mortgage company was badgering her: her house was at risk. So when she received messages from recruiters on LinkedIn with seemingly perfect job opportunities, she jumped at the chance. One recruiter said she’d need to get her CV professionally edited and referred her to a CV specialist on freelance platform Fiverr. She knew something felt off, but in the moment she didn’t have time to think. “All of the verbiage they were using was: urgent, urgent, urgent. You have to do this now, now, now,” she says.

After being scammed, Jackson’s main feeling was embarrassment. “In the past, there have been instances where I’ve seen other people get sucked into scams and I’ve been like: ‘How could you fall for that?’” she says. “And then I fall for it, and I’m thinking to myself: ‘How could you be so stupid?’”

This is a very common sentiment, says Homewood. Research by the Cyber Helpline has found that victims rate the mental health impacts of fraud as much more significant than financial ones. “The primary thing is feeling stupid,” she says.

Conventional wisdom advises that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. But Webb and Homewood urge against framing recruitment fraud in a way that places the blame on victims. “I really, really want victims to know that this is not their fault,” Webb says. “These are criminals, and you are a victim of a crime.”

There are some practical steps you can take to try to spot a scam. Be particularly suspicious of unsolicited contact, messages from generic emails such as Gmail or Yahoo addresses, and communications conducted over WhatsApp or social media. If you’re unsure about a company, you can research it by looking it up on Companies House (if it’s registered in the UK). If you see a job advert or receive an offer you’re suspicious of, you could reach out directly to the hiring company to check it is legitimate.

But, as Webb says, this is not always practical. People desperate for work may be applying for hundreds of positions; they may not recognise that someone is approaching them out of the blue. “Scams work often because they’re targeting people who are time-poor, or distracted, or in the middle of something,” she says.

Online recruitment platforms also bear some responsibility, Rosser says. He would like to see a more robust, standardised system for checking the validity of job adverts posted to such sites.

If you believe you have been the victim of a recruitment scam, the first thing to do is contact your bank; use the number on the back of your card so you know you’re getting through to the genuine fraud team. In some cases, you may be able to get your money back. Homewood also encourages victims to report the incident to the police via Report Fraud, even if you don’t expect much to come of it, as reporting can help the police find patterns of fraud.

In a cruel twist, if you have fallen for one con, you may find you are soon approached with another. “There’s this really horrible phrase, ‘suckers list’, which is something that criminals refer to – whereby, if they’ve caught someone once in one of these scams, they then consider putting you on a ‘suckers list’ to continue to target you,” says Webb.

One example of this, known as a recovery scam, happens soon after an initial incident. Say you’re the victim of a fake job scam or another fraudulent scheme; someone posing as a lawyer or other agent may reach out offering to recover the money you’ve lost. At some point, they will request an upfront fee. This is also a scam.

Looking closely at the emails from my “headhunter”, there were some red flags. Although I found a LinkedIn account matching the headhunter’s name and photo, that person appeared to be based in Madrid – a strange choice for an American employer – and their LinkedIn posts were in Spanish. The email address of the person who contacted me included this headhunter’s name, but it was a generic Gmail address rather than a corporate email. And while their email signature also said they were based in Madrid, the phone number listed was American, with a Tennessee area code. It just so happens that the CV specialist the headhunter first referred me to appears to be based in Tennessee.

After I stopped responding, the headhunter followed up, emphasising my suitability for the mystery role. Even now, she (was she even a she?) seemed convincing. Her message felt human. “I know things can get busy, especially while transitioning back into work after time away, so I didn’t want the thread to get lost on your side,” she wrote.

In response, I was upfront. I wrote and said I now believed this job offer was a scam – that the job didn’t exist and was a ploy to get me to pay for CV writing services from the start. I told her I was writing an article about job scams. What was her response to this allegation? I wanted answers, for the purposes of this article but also personally. Why did they target me, specifically?

Previously so quick to reply, the headhunter didn’t respond.

Even though I’d recognised the scam early and hadn’t lost any money, I felt a tiny bit bereft. Just for a moment, I’d found myself daydreaming about what this new, exciting role might be like – and what I could do with the salary. My ego was dented. Was it so unbelievable that someone would spot my brilliance and offer me the perfect job?

Jackson empathises. “Emotionally, it’s kind of … I don’t want to say devastating, but it is a huge letdown,” she says. In her case, she managed to get her money back, but her job hunt continued. She ended up losing her home, though she is sanguine about the experience. “I don’t have that financial pressure any more, and I’m staying with family, so I’m able to be more intentional about my job search,” she says.

She doesn’t want to jinx anything, but she’s expecting an offer soon.

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