ALBAWABA - In a recently published report, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that employment scams increased by 118% in comparison to the previous year as fraudsters took advantage of artificial intelligence to gain funds and private data from unwary job searchers.
According to ITRC, thieves typically take on the persona of potential employers and publish fabricated job openings to lure candidates. They then extract important information throughout the "interview" stage. The listings are frequently posted on reliable platforms like LinkedIn and other job search websites, making it difficult to distinguish fact from fable.
The Federal Trade Commission reports that in 2022, consumers lost $367 million to schemes involving business opportunities and jobs, a 76% increase from the previous year, according to CNBC, with the FTC adding that the average victim suffers a $2,000 loss.
“AI tools help refine the ‘pitch’ to make it more believable as well as compensate for cultural and grammar differences in language usage,” the report reads, adding that such generative AI tools give fraudsters the ability to create job ads and recruiting emails that have a more genuine appearance.
Eva Velasquez, ITRC president and CEO, notes that while “job scams have been around since there were jobs, they’ll continue to grow because of a number of external factors that are occurring,” explaining that due to the pandemic-era increase in remote work, employees and job seekers are now increasingly used to doing business exclusively online, making such scams easier.
Velasquez and the FTC list some tips to protect oneself from such scams, like avoiding excessive trust in popular job seeking sites, confirming the company's existence and hiring status, being skeptical of employment offers that seem too good to be true and always conducting adequate research before accepting, and remembering that phone calls are not an assurance of safety.
