How fake job adverts prey on desperate youth

This was more than 24 hours later. I could not even reverse the mobile money transaction,” Walter moans.

These experiences show the importance of conducting a thorough background check on a prospective employer or any opportunity forwarded to you, especially from social cyber space forums.

With basic graphic skills and a few coins to buy data bundles, anyone can create a poster and mislead unsuspecting and desperate people into buying whatever lie they are selling.

Raphael Maithya, Amazon Fronts Limited Business Development Manager says that fresh graduates and people who have been jobless for a long time are most likely to fall for job scams.

“Being unemployed for a long time brings desperation and a weakened thought process. It is easy to manipulate someone who is desperate for a job into paying a small amount for a job,” says Maithya.

He says that someone in stable employment has the ability to question adverts that they come across. A US-based job site found out that only one out of 70 stay-at-home opportunities that were advertised online was genuine.

FlexJobs, a recruitment company that lists jobs for stay-at-home job seekers also found out that at 20 per cent, millennials were more likely to fall for job scams than their seniors.

At only 13 per cent, older people who were more stable in their careers were less likely to fall prey to scammers.

In an interview with Forbes, Brie Reynolds, a senior career adviser at FlexJobs also pointed out that scammers had found a new way to lure job seekers desperate for career development.

Reynolds said the ‘career advancement grant’ scam was the new wave that was luring people to give out their personal information, opening the door to identity theft and was quickly gaining root on the Internet globally.

“People receive unsolicited emails implying that the government wants to give them a grant to pay for professional development or career advancement activities.

These emails ask people to apply online to see if they qualify for the grant, supposedly funded by the government.

Then, the sender promises the money ‘can be direct deposited in your account’ should you qualify for the grant,” Reynolds said.

Since the false career advancement grant is a slight deviation from the day-to-day job scams that ask for money at one point, it is attracting many innocent youth who are still young in their careers and are keen for fast growth.

According to the recruitment company, young job seekers also still fall for job scams that have for a long time been used by conmen.

They include instant job offer scams, unsolicited job offers, generic job descriptions, false promises of large salaries for little work and generic email addresses.

A disgruntled job seeker who lost money to a fake job promise earlier this month wrote to us seeking advice on how to get her money back.

Cecilia narrated how she came across an advertisement for internship from what appeared to be USAID Kenya and without wasting time applied for it.

She would be contacted a few weeks later with a promise that she had been placed for an internship at the coveted NGO. Cecilia says she was elated. But there was a catch.

“I was super excited. Among the requirements was Sh1,000 for medical assessment and further communication was to be made on Thursday about the venue’s for training in the listed counties,” says Cecilia.

But communication between Cecilia and people who claimed to recruit from USAID Kenya was disconnected the moment she wired the Sh1,000. The number they communicated through was said to be out of service.

But it wasn’t just Cecilia who fell for the scam. Many social media platforms last month were heated by complaints from people who parted with different amounts of money after they fell for the scam that promised them work with the top NGO.


A picture of the fake advert that had a generic job description of an intern’s position at USAID also made rounds on social media, with some Facebook users sending warning that it wasn’t a real job.

But the warning came too late as job seekers like Cecilia had already fallen prey to the scam.

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https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001303581/beware-of-fake-job-adverts/business/


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