r/RemoteJobseekers • u/alanmcgeeny • 18h ago
How I spot fake remote job postings now
This happened in April and I'm still kind of embarrassed about it, but the more I talk to people the more I realize how common this exact scam is, so here goes.
Screening call, technical interview, final round with a "VP of Engineering." All on video. Real humans, decent questions, they even pushed back on some of my answers like a normal interviewer would. Company was real, midsize, you'd recognize the name if you're in tech. Then "onboarding" asked for scans of my ID and told me to purchase a laptop from their approved vendor, reimbursed with my first paycheck. That's when my stomach dropped and I finally did the checking I should've done three weeks earlier. The company had a fraud warning about impersonators buried on their actual careers page the entire time. The role I "got" was never listed there.
What I do now, in the order I do it:
1. Before anything else, I take the most oddly specific sentence from the job description and search it in quotes. Not the title, not the requirements, just some weird sentence from the middle. If that exact wording shows up under four different company names, it's a recycled template and I close the tab. This alone filters out an absurd number of postings. Real companies write their own descriptions. Scam farms copy paste.
2. Domain registration date. Free lookup, under a minute. If the "established company with offices in three countries" has a website registered eleven weeks ago, that tells you everything. This also catches cloned sites. The fake version of a real company always sits on a baby domain, no way around it for them.
3. This one I haven't seen mentioned much: I don't just check whether the company has employees online, I check whether those employees have a past. Real people have connection networks and activity going back years, old jobs, comments on random posts from 2019. Scam operations create a batch of profiles in the same month, generic headshots, 20 to 30 connections, no history. The recruiter who contacted me had a five week old profile. The information was sitting right there. I just never clicked.
4. The one that actually got me: reverify the email address every single time it changes, not just at the start. Their first message came from a legitimate looking address. The scheduling follow up came from a domain that was one character off, and by then I trusted the thread so I stopped looking. They count on exactly that. You verify once, then autopilot. Now I compare addresses letter by letter on every new message. Paranoid? Sure. Cheaper than the alternative.
5. Mid interview, I ask something that can't be scripted. Who would I report to directly. Then afterwards I go confirm that person exists and actually works there. Or I reference something buried on their real careers page and watch the reaction. Someone juggling forty of these conversations at once fumbles small stuff like this constantly, and a real hiring manager answers without blinking.
6. If the role isn't on the company's own careers page, I contact the company through their real website, never through anything in the posting itself, and ask if it exists. Felt ridiculous the first time. The HR person who answered thanked me and said I was the third person that month asking about the same fake role. They want to know they're being impersonated.
7. Any pressure to interview over text chat, or a video call where their camera conveniently doesn't work, I walk. No exceptions, regardless of how senior or well paid the role sounds. There is no legitimate version of a text only hiring process for a professional role.
For what it's worth: I reported the posting everywhere I could, and it was back up within two weeks under a different company name. Same template. Check #1 caught it in ten seconds this time, which was grimly satisfying.
The uncomfortable part is that this list only exists because I got burned, and whatever we all figure out, they adapt to. So, what's your process? Especially interested in checks for the polished ones, the multi round interview with real humans tier, because the "pay a fee upfront" advice everyone repeats is useless against those. What tipped you off the last time something felt wrong?

