Job Scams

Today I got a notification on my phone from LinkedIn News saying that the second biggest scam in the world right now is “fake job opportunities,” which is hilarious coming from LinkedIn. This is the same app where people write 1,000 word essays about how they learned resilience from spilling iced coffee on their keyboard. The same app where people take a promotion from Shift Supervisor to Shift Lead and call it a transformative career pivot.

I told my friend about the Linkedin scam warning, and he immediately sent another fake job listing into the group chat. This is kind of our thing now. We pass around scam jobs like its currency.

I’ll admit, I’ve fallen for the LinkedIn algorithm’s romance. One day I applied to “Growth Hacker (Remote, Worldwide)” I never even saw the description. I clicked “Easy Apply,” hit “Send,” and immediately regretted it when they asked for three writing samples, a video pitch, and my firstborn’s fingerprints. “Your application is under review!” I celebrated like I just bought my first house until I remembered they wanted me to pay $20 for their exclusive onboarding webinar. That’s when I realized I was the product, not the candidate.

The latest one I received came from a woman named Maya. Maya said my “background and resume” made me a perfect fit for a job at Target helping “merchants increase visibility.” I’m not sure what that means. The message said I could make $500 a day working only 60 to 90 minutes. Which sounded amazing, but it was fake.

What I don’t understand is what the end goal of these scams even is. I can’t figure out how they make money. There’s no call to action. No link. Just a weirdly optimistic opportunity and a cash promise that would put you in better standing than most 22 year olds immediately. 

One night around 12:30, I was sitting in the back of an Uber, head spinning from too much Busch Light, when the driver started telling me about his new startup. It was an app that would let regular people report crimes to the police. I nodded, but all I could think was, “Isn’t that just calling the police?”. I didn’t say anything, because I think I understood what was really happening. It was about having an idea.

At some point in the last decade, “just working” stopped being enough. Now everyone has to be building something. Scaling something. The Uber driver wasn’t just trying to impress me with his app. He was trying to prove he wasn’t just a guy driving drunk kids around at midnight. And I get it. We’re all afraid of being seen as stagnant. No one wants to admit they’re stuck, especially not in a culture that sees ambition as a kind of moral hygiene.

The problem is that the same desperation leaks into everything. At a certain point, you stop being able to tell which listings are real and which are fake, because they both sound equally fake. Real jobs now ask for things like “resilience in high-energy startup environments,” which means nothing as far as I’m concerned, except maybe that you’ll be asked to do the work of three people while your boss paces behind you in an Arc’teryx vest pretending he’s on a call with investors. It’s all the same language of vague importance terms like “stakeholder synergy” and “fast-paced innovation ecosystem” which if we ever admitted how useless this all is, we might never log back on.

The sad part is, jobs used to be worse in a very straightforward way, you got paid poorly, you worked long hours, and your manager threw a stapler at your head. But at least no one was calling it a “mission.” Now it seems people are asked to feel grateful for the chance to burn out. The trick of modern work isn’t just that it’s exploitative. It’s exploitative and requires you to pretend you’re lucky to be there.

You’re expected to identify with the brand, to post about “crushing it with the team” after a 10-hour shift where your lunch was a string cheese and a walk around the parking lot. 

I once applied for a job for a company that didn’t exist yet. Easy-apply makes it so easy to send an application that I applied before reading their job description which effectively said, “You are applying to change the world.” I don’t know how being a copy writer could do that, but I wish I got the job so I could find out.

A couple days ago I realized I have five resumes and nine cover letters circulating in an economy powered seemingly by vibes.

And the people sending these fake job scams? I think they’ve just figured out that no one wants a job, we want a job that makes us feel like a person again. That’s what the scam is selling. The illusion that you’ll stop feeling like you’re constantly underwater in your own life.

Because sometimes when I get a message that says, “We loved your profile,” a tiny part of me lights up, even though the profile it’s referencing still has a typo in the word “available.”

And maybe that’s why we keep sending these job scams into the group chat, because it’s funny that the most consistent recognition we’ve gotten this year has been from a fake recruiter named Brenda with a Bitmoji.

She says I’m going places. Where? I don’t know. But apparently it only takes 60 to 90 minutes a day.

Yesterday, I applied for a role as “Assistant to a Visionary Entrepreneur.” It paid in “experience points” and “networking opportunities,” but they did offer free branded socks. I’m waiting to hear back. In the meantime, I keep hitting refresh on LinkedIn with the same excitement I used to reserve for Instagram likes. Because hope is a habit you can’t quite kick.

So yes, fake job scams are everywhere. But maybe they’re only as absurd as the world that made them. And until “genuine career opportunities” come with health insurance, a living wage, and a sense of dignity, I’ll keep trying to figure out which notifications are real, and which ones are the second biggest scam of 2025.