At first glance, the job might look great: Generous pay and benefits, flexible hours and the ability to work from home. Best of all, the recruiter in charge of filling the position thinks you'd be so perfect for it that they went to the trouble of tracking down your email address or finding you on social media.

Seems too good to be true? It probably is, but cybersecurity experts say employment scams are on the rise, boosted by recent layoffs in the tech and other industries.

Falling for the scams could have big consequences. Job seekers stand to lose precious dollars at a time when they can least afford to, along with their most personal information, likely setting them up for identity theft or other kinds of fraud down the road.

Many people know to be automatically suspicious of job pitches that come in the form of unsolicited emails and texts, but scams are also showing up on job sites like LinkedIn, or as posts to Facebook groups and other social media, giving them a veneer of false legitimacy that makes them more likely to dupe job seekers.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, didn't respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Meanwhile, when times are tough, people are more likely to ignore what might otherwise seem like obvious red flags, said AJ Nash, vice president of intelligence for the cybersecurity company ZeroFox.

"They're preying on people who are really excited or really desperate," Nash said, noting that in addition to the newly jobless, recent college graduates can also be targets. "Some people are just going to suspend their disbelief."

Often, the scammers will ask for money to pay for application fees or start-up equipment, or sensitive private information like Social Security numbers to put the job-seeker on the payroll or do a background check. It's almost always a scam, Nash said.
An example of a fake job listing posted to Facebook. ZeroFox © Provided by CNET An example of a fake job listing posted to Facebook. ZeroFox

The continued shift to remote work, and in many cases remote hiring, has also made it easier for these kinds of scams to flourish, said Steve Grobman, senior vice president and chief technology officer for McAfee.

Fake companies were just easier to spot when people interviewed for jobs in person, he said. Scammers just can't create a full-blow, Colleges in-person office environment, but it's not hard to duplicate a real company's website and carry out interviews by Zoom.

With the less sophisticated scams, emails, texts and other messages can be sent out by the millions, Grobman said. Many of them will get sucked up by spam filters, or immediately deleted by those who receive them, but a few will inevitably get through and be responded to.

"I think a lot of it is a numbers game, he said. "There doesn