IS THIS JOB POSTING A SCAM?

WHAT THESE USUALLY LOOK LIKE

• The whole thing happens on a messaging app

  A recruiter reaches out, and the interview turns out to be a text conversation on Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal. No call, no video, no company email address. Real hiring is slow and boring and involves a calendar invite.

• There's a cheque for your equipment

  You're hired, and they send money up front for a laptop or a home-office setup, then ask you to forward part of it to their supplier. The cheque bounces a week later and the money you forwarded was yours.

• The pay doesn't match the work

  Data entry, product reviewing, package forwarding — $35 to $50 an hour, flexible, no experience needed. The rate is the bait, and it's set just high enough to be tempting and just low enough to be plausible.

• They want your documents before they want a conversation

  A passport scan, a driving licence, bank details or a tax number, requested during onboarding for a job you never really interviewed for. This is often the entire point of the posting.

• The company is real, the recruiter isn't

  The name, the logo and the boilerplate are lifted from a company that exists. The email domain is a near-miss of the real one, or it's a free mail account. The company itself usually has no idea.

• You need to pay for something first

  A background check, a training module, certification, or software you have to buy through their link. Legitimate employers pay for their own hiring costs, always.

• It's a real job, reposted by someone else

  Scrapers repost genuine listings to harvest applications. The listing is fine; the place you're applying through isn't. The tell is that the posting doesn't exist on the company's own careers page.

IF YOU ALREADY REPLIED

This is the part almost nothing on the internet covers properly, and it's the part that's actually urgent. What matters is what they got.

• ·Bank details — tell your bank now, and watch the account. If you deposited and forwarded a cheque, say that explicitly; it changes what they can do.
• ·ID or a tax number — a fraud alert or a credit freeze is the meaningful step, not a password change.
• ·Just a CV and an email — much less serious. Expect more of the same to arrive, and treat anything that follows as suspect.

Paste the exchange and it works out which of these you're in, drafts the message to the bank or the platform, and sets you a reminder to check back. That last part is the difference between knowing what to do and having done it.

IT MIGHT ALSO JUST BE A BAD LISTING

Some real jobs are advertised terribly. Vague titles, no salary, typos, a recruiter who writes like a bot — none of that is proof of anything on its own. Being told "this looks real, here's what to check before you send anything" is a useful answer too.

And when it can't tell, it says I DON'T KNOW rather than guessing at you.

WE DON'T KEEP IT

Whatever you send goes to the model for that one request and is then dropped. File bytes are never stored — only the filename. The privacy policy spells out the rest.

QUESTIONS

I already sent my documents. What now?

Move fast on the things that are time-sensitive: tell your bank if they have account details, and place a fraud alert or freeze on your credit file if they have a tax number or ID. Paste the exchange here and it will work out which of those apply to you and draft the messages.

Is it free?

Your first one is free with no account. After that a free account gets you three a day. Pasting text costs nothing extra — you only need Pro if you want to upload a screenshot or a file.

Can you check the company too?

Yes. Send the company's site or the careers page link and it will read the page rather than just checking a name. Whether the posting exists on the company's own site is usually the fastest thing to check.

What if it turns out to be real?

Then you get told that, with the reason. Plenty of genuine postings are badly written, and a badly written listing is not evidence of anything.