Have you been getting unprompted text messages promising “high-paying jobs” or “easy money” for what sounds like suspiciously little work?
If so, you’re not alone. Job scam texts have proliferated over the past few years, thanks to increasingly sophisticated robotexting tech, lagging regulatory responses, and a cryptocurrency industry run amok.
While the levelheaded among us tend to ignore or block these messages, one enterprising journalist decided to go down the rabbit hole and sign up with one of the scammers promising easy money for an online job — and what he found there drew the curtain back, at least a bit, on a seedy underbelly of the internet that takes advantage of the credulous and desperate.
As Alexander Sammon writes for Slate, things “got weirder than I could have imagined” when he responded to an iMessage text purporting to be from an “Indeed recruiter” — a thing that doesn’t exist, given that Indeed is a job posting site and recruiters operate outside its confines — with an area code from the Philippines, a country known for its digital scam rings.
“Hi there! Sorry to interrupt. I’m from Indeed,” the opening forte read. “We’re currently recruiting remote product testers (U.S.-based). This role lets you earn $50–$400 per day by spending just 60–120 minutes daily testing and reviewing new products or services online.”
Deciding to see where those messages led, Sammon responded and was soon introduced to “Cathy,” his “coach” who claimed, from a Los Angeles area code, to be from Enschede, the Netherlands — though strangely, she spelled it “Enksod,” which wasn’t even the wildest misspelling she dropped on Sammon by the end of the tale.
Cathy was not a patient boss. When the Slate writer took too long to respond, she would follow up asking if he was still there. Once, she sent a WhatsApp voice note that sounded “sort of humanoid” asking if he was still there. Another time, after Sammon got back to her late, she told him she thought he may have been “taken away by aliens.”
The job, as Cathy explained to Sammon, was both simple and puzzling. He would be doing “music promotion” by essentially acting as a human bot, boosting song play counts by clicking a bunch on album covers and painstakingly sending over screenshots of each interaction. This all took place within a platform called “Interleave,” which he’d never heard of. The company claimed to be based in Ontario, but when Sammon contacted the Ontario Business Registry, he was told that no such company exists within that province (though per Futurism‘s quick perusal of Google, it does have some traces of a digital footprint.)
For every “day” of work — which was, per Cathy’s estimation, actually just an hour or two — Sammon would supposedly earn $100. There was, of course, a catch: the money was routed through a crypto wallet, an unexplained caveat that gave the whole gambit an even scammier feel.
Once crypto came into the picture, Sammon “began to panic a little.” It’s not hard to see why — beyond the air of scammery surrounding his new “job,” the intentionally-anonymous world of crypto is also host to all manner of cons. Add in the international inequity that seemed apparent from the jump with that Philippines area code and the desperate job-seekers that typically fall for such predatory messages, we can’t say we wouldn’t get cold feet too.
Thusly, the writer ghosted, but after getting a call from an unknown central California number with an “annoyed, non-native-English-speaking but definitely human Cathy” on the line, he decided to proceed.
After ample clicking during his first shift, Cathy informed Sammon that he had “met the music bunble [sic]” — which sounds like a typo for “bundle,” except that she kept using the word even after Sammon would write “bundle” in response. The “bunble,” it seems, had to do with hitting a click quota that would result in being paid for the day — but with a catch that ultimately got to the heart of the entire scam.
Full of twists and turns, we don’t want to spoil Sammon’s adventure outright, though a keen eye could probably figure out what’s going on based on clues we already dropped. To read the rest of this scammy saga, check out the full article at Slate.
And as always, if you or someone you love has any information about this scam or others like it, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at [email protected].
More on scams: Scammers Stole the Website for Emerson College’s Student Radio Station and Started Running It as a Zombie AI Farm
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