Short answer: if it came out of nowhere and pays well for very little work, be careful. Fake job offers have surged as more people search for remote work, and scammers know exactly who's looking.
It usually starts with a text or a message on WhatsApp or LinkedIn, not a real job board. The offer sounds great: flexible hours, high pay, little experience needed. There's rarely a real interview, at most a short chat over text with someone who never gets on a video call. Once you're "hired," they ask you to buy your own equipment, deposit a check and wire part of it back as a "refund," or hand over your bank details to get set up for direct deposit.
None of that is how real hiring works. The goal is either to drain your bank account through a fake check, or to collect enough personal information to open credit in your name.
A real employer never asks you to pay for your own training, software, or equipment before you've started. If money is supposed to flow toward you and instead it starts flowing from you, that's the scam revealing itself.
Search the company name plus the word "scam" before responding to anything. Look up the person who contacted you on LinkedIn, a real recruiter has a real, established profile, not one created last week. Ask for a video call, a scammer will always have an excuse to avoid one. And never deposit a check from an employer and send any portion of it back, that's the single clearest sign of a fake job scam, banks can take weeks to discover a check is fraudulent, by which point the money you sent back is gone for good.
This is one trick out of dozens. The Scam-Proof Playbook covers phishing, phone scams, AI voice cloning, and more, in plain language, with real examples.