Being on the job market myself, I noticed that more and more scamming attempts are published, and most of the time uncensored, on Facebook job groups. The lack of serious from the administrators of such job pages, mainly abandoned for not being profitable, creates a lot of issues, unfortunately making a lot of victims.
Cambodia has recently been pointed as a country where looking for a job, for certain people, could turn into a true life-threatening nightmare. Thankfully the authorities looked into it and are now closing down businesses that re-established slavery, employing and locking down people against their will, robbing them from their passport and mistreating them, sometimes adding abuse and violence.
Of course, the more desperately people need a job, the more likely they fall in a trap. Scammers are numerous and their ways of wrongdoing show looping patterns.
In order to fight those scammers, knowing that they would pop in immediately, I decided to create and administrate a Facebook job group, named "Verified Jobs In Cambodia & SEA". Statistics are astounding: I have to delete posts and ban members up to 30 per day, scammers keeping coming back with new fake profiles, variants of their noxious stratagems, but as I personally check the reality and reliability of all the jobs I post on the group, they cannot make their way under my watch.
A few typical scams that you should be aware of: - profiles looking for collaborators online for various tasks (writing, translating, formatting documents into PDF), no company is mentioned, the profile is usually empty of content and real friendships, the only goal is to access your banking information - profiles looking for assistants (real estate, financial products, commercial), no company is mentioned either, the profiles are also empty of content and real friendships, again, they want to access your banking information - the fake company with fake website (more difficult to uncover) that will propose real jobs, mostly commercial ones, they can even have a physical address in the country, but there is no possibility to make contact elsewhere than Facebook, and if you go to the address you will find an empty room - the existing company that proposes mostly CSR jobs (this is telemarketing, it has nothing to do with corporate social responsibility, it is in fact the complete opposite) for people with or without experience, announcing attractive salaries based on no average level in the country, accommodation, food, permission to take holiday (when it is in fact mandatory in the labour law's articles), actually, jailing you for good and turning you into slaves Have a look at most Facebook job groups and you will find those 4 typical scams, in impressive quantity. Yes, administrating my job group takes time, I do it for free, I do not intend to monetise the group. It is a way of giving back to the community in Cambodia, a country that is still in the middle of a radical change, where outlaws are not welcomed but can still hide. The country being seen as a new eldorado for job seekers, those scammers find it a nice experimental field. Anyone of you looking for jobs can help to stop those practices, in a rapid way: first, press the laughing emoticon under the post, so that people can immediately see that at least someone has not taken the post seriously. Then comment "scam alert". Bots are never tired to publish more and more scams, but the goal is to draw the attention of people on them so that soon their methods are known and no one answers their posts anymore. A little gesture that will on a long-term create a lot more sustainability on the job market. Thanks for thinking of it!