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Cybercriminals are growing in the country’s dark corners, especially in the job market industry.
A mother of three fell victim to job recruitment scammers losing a life-changing amount as a 51-year-old. Rose subsists on jobseeker benefits and a meagre salary from her evening hotline service.
She struggles to pay the $500 weekly rent for the house she and her kids, ages 12 and 16, share close to the Gold Coast. She frequently has to balance paying for gas and food.
Rose said someone pretending to be a recruitment officer contacted her over WhatsApp. The deal was to give her a $950 weekly payout in exchange for fake review copies for high-profile hotel chains and other eCommerce businesses.
“You had to buy things [online]. You’re reviewing them as though you had bought them, the first one they paid for, and then you had to pay for them yourself,” Rose said.
“Or you’re doing reviews on hotels – you went on to Google, on to the review section, but you hadn’t stayed in them.”
The shady part is that Rose needs to put in her personal money to get her tasks. The perpetrators lured her using a “pre-paid tasks” deal. The two days’ work provided her with $400 making it look legit until the phoney recruiters halted paying Rose back.
“They basically bleed you dry until they’ve got all your money. The $10,000 that I lost, it was actually part of my business money.”
Antipoverty Centre spokesperson and Disability Support Pension recipient Kristin O’Connell argued that the government’s welfare regulations make individual job seekers vulnerable to scammers.
“The reason the poorest people in the community are particularly vulnerable to these scams isn’t because they’re not suspicious of them, it’s because the inadequacy of our welfare system leaves us desperate,” O’Connell says.
“People can feel forced to participate in recruitment scams through fear of having their jobseeker payment stopped. People on jobseeker are generally not allowed to turn down paid work. The rules are so punitive that some don’t have the confidence to question whether they can be forced to take these sorts of ‘jobs’.”
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