Job seekers confronting a difficult labor market are facing a wave of increasingly sophisticated employment scams, with fraudsters using artificial intelligence to generate convincing fake job offers designed to steal personal and financial information.
Reports of employment scams doubled in 2025 from the prior year, according to a recent study from the Better Business Bureau. Gen Z applicants have been hit particularly hard: about 32% said they had been a victim of a job scam, compared with 15% of Gen Xers.
“It’s one thing to say ‘don’t open attachments’ and ‘that email is dangerous,’ but if I think this email might be my shot at getting a job, it’s a different risk,” said Josephine Wolff, a cybersecurity policy professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. “Unemployed job seekers are in a very vulnerable position and susceptible to this type of manipulation.”
Fraudsters are using AI to become more sophisticated and faster, said Pardis Emami-Naeini, a computer science professor at Duke University.
“Before AI, there was quite a bit of labor in these scams, meaning they were often generic, filled with typos and easier to detect,” Emami-Naeini said. “Now everyone can turn out a highly effective and sometimes personalized [false] job message very quickly and use it at scale.”
Scammers posing as employers often guide victims through a fake hiring process before requesting bank account details under the guise of a $1 background check or setting up direct deposit for payroll, according to the report. Others embed malware into links or attachments.
Sally, a 22-year-old graphic design graduate from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, said she received a fraudulent interview request last month while job-hunting. The email appeared to come from a real biotech company and used sophisticated language, a company logo, and a professional-looking email domain. She said she only realized it was a scam after searching for her original application and finding the same email posted on Reddit.
“You think you’ll spot the warning signs. But you’re not the exception, you’re prey to it too,” Sally said. “That’s the reality of this hell job market.”
Hruthik Narayan Sarva, 25, a software engineer in North Carolina, said he had applied to more than 1,500 jobs and internships since last October and had not received even a rejection email from most. He said he became suspicious during a chat-based Microsoft Teams interview when there was no name attached to the interviewer. When he contacted the company directly, the job offer was fake.
Sarva said the experience was especially frightening as an international student. “I am living in this country alone and away from my parents,” he said. “I didn’t know what job scams were or that they could happen.”
Katie Miller, 47, a senior graphic designer in Oregon laid off in October, said she had sent more than 400 applications. She said she realized she was being scammed when a purported executive from Frontier Senior Living promised a quick turnaround after a prescreening interview. She reached out to the company, which confirmed the executive had been impersonated.
“It’s just a really frustrating job market and now add this to the pile,” Miller said. “People already want to give up and [the scammers] know this, so they see it as an opportunity for them.”
Priya Rathod, a workplace trends expert at Indeed, said job seekers should be wary of promises that seem too good to be true. “The scammers promise you the world,” Rathod said. “You’re going to have high pay, flexibility, great benefits, but ultimately the actual job is extremely vague. That is a red flag.”
Alongside generous offers, recruiters will often request personal or financial information, another warning sign. “Recruiters will never ask for personal information or money,” Rathod said.
A Frontier Senior Living spokesperson said the company was aware that scammers were impersonating its employees. Both Monster and Indeed said their security teams monitor job postings and remove illegitimate listings, though scammers often contact candidates directly through messages or emails found on those platforms.
“These scams really erode job seekers’ confidence in the job search process,” Rathod said. “We cannot control what the scammers do, but we can control what goes up on the website, and we frequently post educational information about the latest job scams for job seekers.”
Some job seekers said they had moved their searches to platforms where listings are vetted. Sarva said he was using Handshake, a platform for college students and recent graduates. Sally said she was focusing on local job boards and networking with other artists at cafes, while keeping a meticulous spreadsheet of applications.
“The scammers are not random people in a basement — they are professional groups of people,” Sally said. “What I can do is control what I do: staying motivated, doing my research and being organized.”
Experts recommend reporting suspected job scams to the platform where they were encountered, such as LinkedIn or Indeed, and to consumer protection organizations including the Federal Trade Commission.