Remote job scams: how to check a posting in two minutes

Reported losses to job and employment agency scams went from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024, and the number of reports tripled over the same four years — that is the Federal Trade Commission's count, published with its March 2025 fraud data. The check that keeps a posting from turning into one of those reports takes about two minutes, and none of it involves reading the job description more carefully.

That is the part worth saying first. Fake postings are not badly written any more. Plenty of them are copied line for line from a real listing at a real company, which means every instinct you have about tone, typos and vague duties is being tested against text an actual recruiter wrote. What does not copy across is the apply link, and that is where the two minutes go.

The two-minute check, in order

Checking a remote posting before you apply

Each step is verifiable on your own, without contacting anyone. Stop at the first one that fails.

1. 1
   Follow the apply link

   Click through and read the address bar. It should land on the employer's own domain or a hiring vendor's domain, not a form service, a messaging app, or a personal email address.

2. 2
   Find the same posting on the employer's career site

   Open the company's site yourself, from a search, not from a link in the posting. If the same title, location and requisition are not there, the posting is not theirs.

3. 3
   Check the pay line against the occupation

   Look up the median for the occupation, not for the title in the ad. Data entry, customer service and 'online assistant' roles are the three most often inflated.

4. 4
   Look at what the first contact asks for

   A first message asking for a deposit, a check to cash, a crypto wallet, or your bank details before any offer letter ends the process here.

5. 5
   Check where the conversation is happening

   An interview conducted entirely over text or a chat app, with no company email address and no scheduled call, is not a hiring process.

Steps one and two are the ones that do the work. Take a "Data Entry Clerk — Remote" posting on a large aggregator: the description names a recognisable company, the duties match the occupation, the pay is stated. Step one is where a fake one usually stops, because the apply button goes somewhere the employer has no control over. Step two catches the rest, because a scammer can copy a posting but cannot add one to somebody else's hiring system.

Step two only works if you get to the career site independently. Type the company name into a search yourself and open its careers page from those results — not from any link inside the posting, and not from the email that sent you there. Then look for the same title and location. Aggregators run behind, so a posting that has closed will sometimes be missing legitimately; a posting that was never there at all is a different thing, and the difference usually shows up in whether the employer lists a remote Data Entry Clerk role anywhere on the site, under any title.

What the FTC's numbers actually add up to

Reported losses to job and employment agency scams, 2020 to mid-2024

Losses reported to the FTC by year. The 2024 bar covers January through June only.

2020		$90M
2021		$131M
2022		$179M
2023		$286M
2024 (Jan–Jun)		$223M

How to read this. These are dollars reported lost, in the year the report was filed, in the FTC's job and employment agency category. The last bar is half a year, not a full one — the full-year 2024 figure, published in the March 2025 release, is $501 million. The wider "business and job opportunities" category, which also takes in business-opportunity pitches and multi-level marketing, came to $750.6 million in 2024, up nearly $250 million on 2023.

What these numbers are not: a count of scams. They count people who filed a report and stated a loss. Nobody publishes how many fake postings are live on any job board on any given day, and no figure here should be read as one — including by anyone who wants to tell you what percentage of remote listings are fraudulent.

They are also not current to this year. As of September 2026, 2024 is the most recent full year the FTC has published a job and employment agency figure for. Its 2025 numbers, given in March 2026 testimony, cover fraud in total — $15.9 billion reported lost across 3 million reports, up from just over $12 billion across 2.6 million reports the year before — without breaking that subcategory out. So $501 million is the latest published figure for job scams specifically, and the direction of travel in the wider data is up.

Which remote job scam grew fastest?

Task scams pay you per small repetitive action inside an app — liking a video, rating a product image — while a counter shows commissions climbing. Then the app asks you to deposit your own money to release them.

FTC Data Spotlight, published December 12, 2024. The shares come from the spotlight's own methodology note, which estimates them from a sample of reports rather than counting every one.

In raw counts that is about 5,000 reports in all of 2023 and about 20,000 in the first six months of 2024, with none at all identified in the FTC's sample of 2020 reports — the category effectively did not exist five years ago. Cryptocurrency losses within job scams reached about $41 million in that same half-year, against about $21 million across all of 2023. The FTC's April 27, 2026 spotlight adds the recruiting channel: one in three people who reported losing money to a job or business opportunity scam in 2025 said it started on social media.

This matters for a Data Entry Clerk search specifically, because "enter records, earn per entry" is the legitimate job that a task scam is imitating. The distinction is not the description. It is that a real data entry employer pays you and a task platform asks you to fund your own account first.

Does the apply link have to be on the company's own website?

No, and expecting it to be will make you reject real postings. Most employers hand the apply step to a hiring vendor, and the vendor's own documentation says what that looks like.

Sources: Greenhouse Support job board and job post URL articles; Workday, Recruiting for Administrators — Career Sites. All retrieved September 2026.

So an unfamiliar subdomain is not evidence of anything on its own. A link that leaves for a personal inbox, a chat handle, or a domain that is one character off the employer's is.

Why "I looked the company up and it's real" is the wrong test

The check that matters is not whether the company exists. It is whether the posting exists inside that company's own hiring system — and those are different questions, because the entire business model of a copied posting depends on the company being real and easy to verify.

The FTC's June 15, 2026 release put reported losses to business impersonators at nearly $1 billion for 2025, inside a $3.5 billion imposter-scam total. What that figure is not: a job scam number. The FTC says the largest share of it went to people impersonating banks, and it does not publish a split for employers specifically — it is evidence that borrowing a real company's name pays, not a measure of how often it happens in hiring. Take it that way and the point stands. A scammer running a fake Data Entry Clerk listing is not hoping you skip the company search. They are counting on you doing it, finding a genuine company with a real address and a real leadership page, and treating that as confirmation of a posting the company never wrote. Verification has to attach to the requisition, not the letterhead.

There is a cost to this rule and it is worth naming: it will make you slower, and it will occasionally make you skip a real posting from a small employer whose career page is out of date. That trade is still worth taking, because the downside on one side is a missed application and on the other it is your bank details.

The pay line is the fastest single tell

O*NET's 2025 wage data puts the median for Data Entry Keyers at $19.88 an hour, or $41,340 a year, across employment of 141,600 in 2024. Its 2024–2034 projection puts the occupation in O*NET's decline band, -1% or lower, with 9,500 openings projected a year — a shrinking occupation, not a growing one, and worth holding in mind when a posting describes urgent mass hiring.

Source: O*NET OnLine, 43-9021.00, retrieved September 2026. Figures are national and cover the whole occupation.

What this table does not tell you: it is not a remote-only wage. O*NET reports one national median for everyone doing the work, in an office or at home, and does not publish a separate remote figure — so it sets the scale of a plausible offer, not a floor for a specific posting. Used that way it is still the quickest filter there is. A remote Data Entry Clerk posting promising a rate far above $19.88 an hour, with no experience required and same-day onboarding, is making a claim about pay that the occupation itself does not support.

What kinds of job scam does the FTC name?

The FTC's job scams page does not treat this as one thing. It runs five named sections: work-from-home job scams, nanny and caregiver and virtual personal assistant job scams, mystery shopper scams, job placement service scams, and government and postal jobs scams. Reshipping and reselling merchandise sit inside the first of those rather than standing on their own. Someone searching for remote Data Entry Clerk work meets two of the five over and over.

The first is the work-from-home scheme, which in its current form is the task platform described above — the job is real-sounding, the interface is polished, and the money only moves in one direction. The second is the job placement service, where what is being sold is not a job but access to one: a fee for a list, a training package, a "certification" you are told the role requires. The FTC's answer to both is the same sentence, and it is absolute rather than hedged: honest employers, including the federal government, will never ask you to pay to get a job. Federal roles in particular are posted on USAJobs.gov, which the FTC names as the government's official site and which is the check for the government and postal variant.

The FTC also suggests two things before you accept anything: look up the name of the company or the person hiring you plus the words "scam," "review," or "complaint" and read what comes back, and talk it over with someone you trust. The second one sounds soft next to a URL check, and it is the one that most often works, because the pressure a scam applies — decide today, onboard tonight, start Monday — is much easier to notice from outside the conversation than inside it.

What no legitimate employer will ask you to do

The FTC's job scams guidance is unusually blunt for a government page, and the sentences are more useful verbatim than paraphrased. After you have run steps one and two, these are the four lines to hold a first contact against:

• "Don't pay for the promise of a job. Honest employers, including the federal government, will never ask you to pay to get a job."
• "No honest potential employer will ever send you a check to deposit and then tell you to send on part of the money."
• "If someone offers you a job and claims that you can make a lot of money in a short period of time with little work, that's almost certainly a scam."
• From the FTC's April 30, 2026 alert on job offer texts: "Ignore generic and unexpected texts, WhatsApp, or Telegram messages about jobs."

None of these describe how the message is written. They describe what it asks you to do, which is the only part a scammer cannot make look normal.

If you are applying for a Data Entry Clerk posting today

Three specifics. First, search the adjacent titles the same work is posted under — O*NET lists Billing and Posting Clerks, File Clerks, Office Clerks (General), and Word Processors and Typists as related occupations, and the legitimate remote openings are often filed under those instead. Second, expect a national median of $19.88 an hour, and treat anything far above it as a claim to verify before you send anything, not a reason to apply faster. Third, ask one question in your first reply: what is the requisition ID and on which career site is it posted? A real recruiter answers in a sentence. Nobody running a fake posting can.

Then apply from the employer's own system, every time. If retyping the same fields into each career site is what pushes you toward the easy-looking link in your inbox, the platform fills those forms from your resume on the employer's site — which is where you wanted to be applying anyway.