According to Keith Rosser, who is both a group director at Reed and co-director and chair of JobsAware, a non-profit looking out for the safety of the UK labour market, this scam began in November 2022. It became “huge” in the UK, he says, from March 2023.
We’re receiving dozens of reports a day, specifically about WhatsApp-based scams copying the names of legitimate recruitment firms, both job boards and recruitment agencies, Rosser told Euronews Next.JobsAware receives about 50 such complaints a day, and they believe only 5 per cent of victims reach out to them, bringing the approximate number of people getting these texts in the UK to 1,000 per day.
The UK’s communications regulator OFCOM recently found that nearly one in three Britons had encountered fake employment ads, and Rosser believes most of them were targeted by this specific WhatsApp scam.
Aylin Elci
I have started receiving similar scam messages over WhatsApp since last month, from phone numbers in Iraq and the Philippines. I obviously blocked them immediately, though it was notable that some of them were written in Romanian, probably intended to reach more people here. The recent availability of AI tools to generate text and translate it into various languages clearly makes it much easier for these kinds of schemes to proliferate. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook will implement measures to prevent or limit these frauds – or if they can, considering the end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp messages would make it impossible for the company to scan the contents of texts in transit.
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