The FBI warns of work-from-home scams that really just take your money
Scammers are tricking victims into making cryptocurrency payments by offering them fake remote jobs, the FBI warned.
According to the warningScammers make cold calls and emails and offer people fake jobs that usually sound too good to be true. These tasks are remote and can be done from home. These usually involve simple tasks such as rating restaurants, or requiring employees to ‘optimize’ a service by repeatedly clicking a button.
The scammers will pretend to be a well-known recruitment agency, or pretend to be a non-existent agency. The actual scam comes when the victim is supposed to be paid. They are invited to join a platform where they can check and track their salaries, but to ‘unlock’ the service they must make a small cryptocurrency payment. Once they make the payment, the money is gone forever.
Fake platforms
To make matters worse, the platform appears to be ‘working’ on the surface. Victims can ‘track’ their payments and even see how they make money. However, they can never withdraw any of it because it’s all just a ruse and the money isn’t real.
To protect itself, the FBI is warning citizens to be cautious of unsolicited job postings and avoid clicking links, downloading files, or opening attachments in these messages.
“Never send money to a purported employer,” the FBI warns, adding that users should not pay for services that claim to be able to recover lost cryptocurrency funds.
And finally, people should never send financial or personally identifying information to people who make an unsolicited job offer, but should instead report it to the FBI IC3.
Fake jobs are nothing new in the world of cybercrime. In fact, they were popularized over the years by Lazarus Group, a notorious North Korean state-sponsored threat actor.