Americans are seeing more employment scams than ever as job seekers, facing a tough job market, report a bombardment of messages from swindlers try to lure them into giving sensitive information.

Experts say the technology behind these scams have only gotten better over time, allowing fraudsters to easily impersonate employers and send out huge floods of direct messages and emails to job seekers.

Reports of employment scams doubled in 2025 from the year before, according to a recent study from the Better Business Bureau (BBB). And gen Z applicants looking to jumpstart their careers have in particular been hit hard: about 32% of gen-Zers report have 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 Tufts University. “Unemployed job seekers are in a very vulnerable position and susceptible to this type of manipulation.”

Last month, Sally got an intriguing interview request while job-hunting online from a Minneapolis cafe.

“We are delighted to inform you that your certifications closely align with several current opportunities,” the email promised. “We respectfully ask that you set up an online interview as soon as possible.”

Since graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in late 2022, Sally had sent out so many applications for graphic design jobs that the 22-year-old couldn’t remember where they had applied.

That was exactly why the email didn’t immediately raise alarms. The sender, “Ryan L Goodson”, said he was from a real biotech company that was based in Seattle. He used sophisticated language, had a company logo in his signature and a professional-looking email domain.

“I didn’t want to look silly in the interview, so I tried searching for my original application,” Sally said. Soon, they realized they had never applied to a job at the company.

The mystery led Sally to Reddit, where they found the same fraudulent email copied and pasted in multiple posts.

“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.”

Sophisticated technology

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 either a $1 background check or setting up direct deposit for payroll. Others embed malware into links or attach it to messages.

Hruthik Narayan Sarva, 25, a software engineer in North Carolina, has applied to more than 1,500 jobs and internships since last October and hasn’t received even a rejection email back from most of them.

“I was getting so desperate for a role that when I got [an] email asking for an interview, I thought it was real,” Sarva said.

The email at first failed to raise any red flags. The fraudster said he was from business publisher Mark Farrah Associates and offered Sarva the perfect role: data analyst intern.

“I only became suspicious when in the Teams interview, there was no name attached to the interviewer and he explained it would be conducted via chat,” he said.

That the pay was higher than market rate and the position was remote with flexible hours also raised red flags.

When an interview offer came by text, Sarva turned to his brother for advice, who urged him not to move forward. When Sarva ultimately contacted the company directly, he received bad news: the job offer was fake.

Sarva said the scam was especially scary for him as an international student.

“I am living in this country alone and away from my parents,” he explained. “I didn’t know what job scams were or that they could happen.”

‘Scammers promise you the world’

While employment scams come in various forms, there are several repeated warning signs for job seekers.

Katie Miller, 47, a senior graphic designer in Oregon, was laid off this past October after working for a company for more than six years. Since then she has sent out more than 400 applications and the furthest she ever got was a prescreening interview after several AI phone calls.

She realized she was being scammed after an executive from Frontier Senior Living, a property management company, told her they would get back to her just a day after her interview. The short timeline seemed suspicious – she had never heard back from an interview that quickly – and she soon 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 need to be weary of lofty 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 the generous offerings will often be requests for personal or financial information, which is another telling sign. “Recruiters will never ask for personal information or money,” Rathod said.

Companies are aware that scammers are posing as employers and urge job seekers to be cautious when going through the hiring process.

“It is upsetting to see scammers attempting to impersonate a Frontier employee,” a Frontier Senior Living spokesperson said.

Both Monster and Indeed said their security teams regularly monitor job postings and remove listings that are not legitimate or breach company guidelines, though scammers often directly message or email candidates they find through these sites.

“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.”

Amid a proliferation of scammers, jobs seekers are becoming suspicious of postings they find on platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn and are moving their searches elsewhere.

Some said they are relying on other methods of finding jobs. Sarva said that he is using Handshake, a job platform offered to college students and recent graduates where listings are vetted. Sally is focusing on local job boards and networking with other artists at cafes, as well as keeping an organized and meticulous spreadsheet of the jobs they’ve applied to.

“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 both to the platform where they were encountered, such as LinkedIn or Indeed, and to consumer protection organizations like such as Federal Trade Commission.