This Job Scam is Suddenly Everywhere
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 980 Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dorothy is looking for a part-time job that will enable her to work from home and accommodate her medical disability. After applying for numerous jobs and posting her résumé online, she receives a message about an app testing job. It seems like a great fit, since she has done similar work in the past, but the complicated system has Dorothy adding her own money to an account in order to unlock elements. It’s a scam that has exploded in recent months - task scams are now the single biggest scam facing job seekers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on, the perfect scam. |
| 0:04.7 | I believed I had a job. |
| 0:07.7 | I worked, okay? |
| 0:10.0 | None of the only stole my time and my dignity. |
| 0:13.4 | They stole my money, and I tried to send myself when I couldn't. |
| 0:17.4 | This world has created a monster. |
| 0:21.6 | Welcome back to the perfect scam. |
| 0:26.6 | I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:29.6 | If you've been online looking for a job lately, and maybe even if you haven't, |
| 0:34.6 | you've probably been hit by invitations to join something we've started calling task scams. |
| 0:41.3 | In the past 12 to 24 months, task scams have come out of nowhere to become the single biggest scam facing job seekers. |
| 0:49.4 | They've quadrupled in size just in the past year, according to the Federal Trade Commission. |
| 0:54.4 | So that's why we're bringing you this story today as soon as we could. |
| 0:58.5 | Because at their heart, these crimes attack human nature in a systematic way that probably |
| 1:04.6 | wouldn't have been possible until recently. And clearly, this particular kind of job scam is |
| 1:10.1 | working for the criminals. |
| 1:12.7 | Why? Because they have gamified their scams. |
| 1:17.2 | We'll show you what we mean. |
| 1:19.1 | Meet Dorothy from Georgia, a woman who has spent a lot of time recently looking for a part-time job. |
| 1:26.1 | I do have some issues like everybody else, and I've been looking for a job for about |
| 1:31.0 | two, three years. So I have applied an all-known job platforms. Anyway, long story |
| 1:38.3 | short, yes, I applied. I couldn't find anything according to what I needed. |
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