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LAST WEEK, A text landed on my phone. “Join the TikTok Marketing Partners Team — Remote Part-Time Opportunities!” it read, offering $850 a day for “only 60-90 minutes per day.” A few weeks before that, another one: “Do you still need work?” And then there was the note from Daisy at Warner Bros., promising a minimum daily pay of $200 for just 30 to 60 minutes of work (a great offer, but not as good as the one from Poshia at Randstad, who was offering $6,000 per day!).
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Alas, as you might’ve guessed, none of these were real. And there’s a good chance many of us have received similar texts. A new study from credit reporting agency Equifax Canada found that a third of all Canadians reported getting these scammy recruitment texts; 13 per cent said they had clicked the link, and six per cent had their identity stolen.
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“We can’t treat scams as background noise anymore,” said Julie Kuzmic, head of consumer advocacy and compliance at Equifax. “The threat of fraud is happening in real time on our phones, in our inboxes. Canadians are telling us these threats feel constant and personal, and too many are left wondering what to do when they’re targeted.”
These kinds of text scams have been on the rise across the world. According to the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., reported losses to job scams tripled between 2020 and 2023. They also come at a moment of high unemployment — and high demand for remote work.
“Often the job will have an easy interview or no interview, promise to let you work from home and let you start right away,” Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Centre, told NBC News.
It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I’d never fall for that!’ But imagine you’re a jobseeker in your ninth month of job-hunting. Do you think you’d be as quick to write it off?
Equifax Canada issued the report as a reminder of sorts not to click any of these links, and to report anything that looks suspicious — basic online security stuff.
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Or, you could do what Alexander Sammon did this summer and follow up as far as the scam will take you and write about it for Slate Magazine. “In the annals of what seems to be one of the lowest-effort scams currently running rampant across America, this felt like an especially low-effort attempt,” he wrote in a piece very much worth reading. “So began a saga that went deeper — and got much weirder — than I ever imagined.” Alas, the job turned out to be as scammy as assumed, and the writer lost out on $96.
It seems these scams aren’t going anywhere, unfortunately. “Fraud today is deeply personal. It’s arriving by text, email or social media in ways that feel familiar and authentic,” noted Kuzmic. “That’s a fear we need to address head-on with the right tools and solutions to protect ourselves and our families.”
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