Someone wrote to me last week. She’d been applying for months with nothing back, and her message ended like this:
“Maybe my CV isn’t good enough? The competition is from all over the world. Or maybe it’s just a scam?”
I want to deal with that last question properly, because it’s the one nobody answers honestly. Most careers advice treats it as beneath discussion — of course the jobs are real, keep applying, stay positive.
That’s not good enough. Some of them are not real. And if you’re job hunting from Southeast Asia, you are targeted more heavily than most people on earth.
So here is the honest version: what’s genuinely dangerous, what’s merely broken, and the checks that separate them in about two minutes.
Yes, this is worse than it used to be
You are not being paranoid. The ground genuinely shifted.
The US Federal Trade Commission’s own summary: reports about job scams tripled between 2020 and 2024, and reported losses jumped from $90 million to $501 million.
The Better Business Bureau’s 2025 Risk Report, built from more than 146,000 reports, found employment scams were the second-riskiest scam type of the year — and the single riskiest for people aged 18 to 34. The median loss was $1,000, against a $93 median across all scam types combined.
And in the BBB’s 2026 update: over 23,000 employment scam reports in 2025 alone, roughly double the year before. About half arrived by text message.
That last detail is the most useful thing in this entire post. Half of it now starts with a message you didn’t ask for.
The regional picture, which is worse again
If you’re in the Philippines, Indonesia or Malaysia, add a layer.
Philippines. In August 2026, the Department of Migrant Workers arrested a recruiter who allegedly collected PhP 80,000 to PhP 130,000 each from around 1,700 Filipinos for jobs in Poland, Lithuania and the Czech Republic — jobs that did not exist. The DMW has had 204,428 illegal recruitment posts taken down from Facebook and TikTok since 2020. Their own warning names the pattern: recruiters “demanding large placement fees or promising unusually high salaries, guaranteed visas, permanent residency or immediate deployment.”
Malaysia. Bukit Aman’s Commercial Crime Investigation Department recorded 1,537 job scam cases worth RM31.8 million in the first quarter of 2026. One quarter. Their director’s advice is a single sentence worth memorising: “Legitimate employers and companies will not ask for registration fees, training fees, deposits or payment for equipment before you start work.”
Indonesia. The Foreign Ministry recorded 6,800 cases of Indonesian citizens caught up in online scam operations across ten countries between 2020 and February 2025, concentrated in Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar.
That last one is the part that isn’t about money.
The version that isn’t about money at all
INTERPOL reported that as of March 2025, people from 66 countries had been trafficked into online scam centres — recruited, in their words, “typically through false job ads,” then held in compounds and forced to run scams on others.
A February 2026 report from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated at least 300,000 people are working in these operations worldwide, most lured by promises of legitimate jobs. Around 7,000 people were released at the Thailand–Myanmar border in a single operation in February 2025.
If a “job” involves travelling to another country, and the recruiter is arranging and paying for the travel, and you have not independently verified the employer — stop. That is the pattern. It is not a scam you lose money to. It is one you lose years to.
Tell someone where you’re going. Verify the company yourself, through a channel the recruiter did not give you. There is no offer good enough to skip this.
The 7 checks
Right. Practical. You have a tab open and a message in your inbox. Two minutes.
1. Does the company exist, with people attached?
Find the website yourself — search the name, don’t click the recruiter’s link. Then find at least two named employees and verify them somewhere else. A company hiring internationally has a footprint: a team page, staff with professional profiles, press coverage, customers.
A website with no names on it is not a company.
2. Are they asking you for money? Any money?
This is the one rule that catches most of them. The FTC’s phrasing is perfect and worth keeping in your head verbatim:
“Never pay anyone to get paid, or to get a job. That’s a sure sign of a scam.”
No training fee. No equipment deposit. No background check fee. No placement fee. No “refundable” anything. No cryptocurrency, ever, for any reason.
Real employers pay you. That’s the direction the money goes. Always.
3. Do they want bank details before a written offer?
Payroll details come after a signed offer, through an HR system or an onboarding platform — not over chat, not in a Google Form, not to a person’s personal email.
If someone wants your account number to “set up direct deposit” during the interview stage, that isn’t onboarding. It’s collection.
4. Have you spoken to an actual human?
Not necessarily face to face — plenty of legitimate processes now start with automated screening. But at some point before an offer, a real person should be answering unscripted questions in real time.
A process that runs entirely through text, with someone who is always unavailable for a call, is not a hiring process.
5. Does the email domain match the company?
hiring@company.com is fine. company.hr.recruit@gmail.com is not.
Check the spelling character by character. Lookalike domains are the whole trick: an extra letter, a swapped rn for m, .co instead of .com. Read it slowly. It’s designed to survive a fast glance.
6. Is the salary a real number?
Legitimate postings say “€45,000–55,000” or “$25/hour.” Scams say “up to $5,000 per week” and “earn $500 a day from home, no experience required.”
Vagueness plus an implausible figure equals bait. If the pay sounds like it was written to make you stop scrolling, it was.
7. Did you find them, or did they find you?
Not disqualifying on its own — real recruiters do reach out. But it flips the burden of proof entirely.
The Australian government’s Scamwatch service has two rules I’d hand to anyone:
“Never believe a job is real just because it appears on a trusted platform or website because scammers post fake ads too.”
“Contact the recruitment agency your recruiter said they work for by using a phone number you’ve sourced yourself.”
That second one is the whole game. Every number, link and email the scammer gives you leads back to the scammer. Find your own route to the company and ask whether this person works there.
The one that’s newest: task scams
This deserves its own section because it barely existed a few years ago and it’s growing faster than anything else.
It starts as a message about “online product optimisation” or “app testing.” You complete simple tasks — like a video, rate a listing, click through screens. You get paid small amounts, genuinely, at first. A balance builds up in a dashboard.
Then withdrawing it requires a deposit. Or the high-paying tier needs you to fund an account. Usually in crypto.
The money is gone the moment you send it.
FTC data: task scams went from essentially zero in 2020 to around 20,000 reports in the first half of 2024 alone — nearly four in ten of all job-scam reports. The BBB recorded a median loss of $2,300 in 2025, more than double the employment-scam median.
The tell is structural, and it never varies: at some point, to get your money out, you have to put money in. A real job never works that way.
Now the uncomfortable middle: it’s probably not a scam
Here’s the part that will actually change how you feel, and it’s the reason I wanted to write this.
Most of the silence you’re experiencing is not fraud. It’s something more mundane and, in its own way, more insulting: the job may never have been real in the first place — legally, openly, with no crime committed at all.
Greenhouse, one of the largest applicant tracking systems in the world, analysed its own platform and classified 18–22% of jobs posted on it as ghost jobs — postings the employer has no immediate intention of filling. An independent academic analysis of Glassdoor data landed at up to 21%, almost exactly matching.
Roughly one in five. Posted to look like the company is growing, to collect a talent pool, to reassure the existing team that help is coming.
So when someone tells me “they post a job but they’re not really hiring” — they’re not being cynical. They’re describing a documented, measurable thing.
You’re playing a game where about a fifth of the doors are painted on.
That isn’t a scam. Nobody took your money. It just quietly consumed weeks of your life and a good deal of your confidence, which is arguably worse.
So what do you do with all this?
Two conclusions, and the second matters more.
First: run the checks. They take two minutes and they’ll catch nearly everything. Screenshot them if you like. The money rule alone — never pay to get paid — handles the large majority.
Second, and this is the real answer: stop applying into the dark.
Every problem in this post is a problem of the channel. Fake postings, ghost postings, unverifiable recruiters, applications vanishing into systems that never reply — these are all diseases of open, anonymous, high-volume job boards.
They basically don’t exist when you go directly.
When you email the Head of Marketing at a company whose website you found yourself, whose team page lists real people, whose product you can actually use — there’s no question of whether the company is real, whether the role is a ghost, or whether “the recruiter” is who they say they are. You went to the source.
That’s not just the safer channel. It’s the one with better odds anyway. I’ve laid out why the application route is structurally stacked against you in your CV isn’t being rejected, it’s not being read, and how to tell which companies will genuinely hire you from Asia in remote-first vs remote-friendly.
One last thing
To the person who asked whether it might just be a scam — and to everyone who’s had that thought at 1am after another week of nothing:
Your doubt was rational. Some of it is fraud, and the data says the fraud is growing. Some of it is ghost jobs, and about a fifth of what you applied to may have been going nowhere by design.
But notice what none of it was.
It wasn’t you not being good enough.
That was the least likely explanation the whole time, and it’s the only one you were seriously considering.