The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has seen an alarming rise in gamified job scams over the past year. The FTC says that reports of job scams have quadrupled each year since 2022 topping out at 20,000 reports at a cost of $41 million in total during the first six months of the year.
Job or task scams often involve the scammer asking someone to do a relatively simple task online such as liking videos or rating product images in assigned sets using terms like “product boosting” or “app optimization,” according to the FTC. People are promised higher payments for completing a certain amount of sets that may pay out small amounts at first but they end up costing more than they pay out in the long run.
Scammers will reach out to people via text messages or communication apps like Whatsapp offering them a task job. The most common type of this scam usually involves some kind of cryptocurrency. Then the scammer may ask their target to deposit some money or “charge up” their account through an app in order to start working on new and bigger sets of tasks. They may even try to convince their victims by hearing testimonials from fake recipients about how much money they made for completing relatively simple tasks.
The victim will “charge up” their accounts with their own money in order to avoid losing what the app shows they’ve earned in the hopes they’ll get their deposited money and the fee they are owed. Instead, the money they’ve been paid isn’t real and any money they’ve deposited to “charge up” their account is lost for good.
The FTC recommends ignoring offers from unknown text or WhatsApp messages and never paying someone for the promise of being paid at a later time or date. The commission also recommends steering clear of any job offers that involve rating or liking things online, a practice the FTC says is “illegal and no honest company will do it.”
