Since the popularity of social media, so many fake job adverts are posted. The perpetrators of this act prey on the desperation of jobseekers and put out bogus vacancies to lure unsuspecting individuals. For several reasons to suspicious locations across the country. In this article, we will mention few reasons gathered from research as to why people put up fake job vacancies.
Let’s start with the one that poses the least threat to security and safety.
Website Engagement
Another reason fake job adverts are posted is to get web engagements. Blogging is a way to make money online. By blogging, you are creating content that a target audience will consume. The audience will keep visiting your site, hence gathering large traffic to your blog or website.
When you have a large enough audience, then it is time to monetize. The most popular way of monetizing your blog is by Google AdSense.
With Google AdSense account, all you need to do is insert a small amount of code into your website pages. This tells Google to put advert content in those part of your web pages, that will generate income form you.
Furthermore, once your blog gains enough traction and gets more popular, you will start receiving advert offers from potential clients.
Even though Google AdSense determines how much you earn from the adverts, you can determine your advert rate.
Safe to say that the amount of money you earn from your website is dependent on the traffic to your website.
So, the question now is, how does this make people put up fake job adverts? Quite simple – they need to get as many traffic as they can to their websites or blogs to gain traction and make their websites popular.
They do this by creating content with fake job adverts every day to updated their websites. Such blogs do not take their time to get real job vacancies.
So instead of waiting around for a real company to advertise real vacant positions or openings, they craft their own and publish it to non-suspecting members of the public thereby gaining the traffic to their websites. We categorize such act as Black Hat SEO method.
Data Theft
Another reason for advertising fake job openings is to collect data from individuals and use it for several purposes such as selling to the black-market buyers for the purpose of email marketing or phone text marketing.
Most times, you will get messages from an unknown company pitching their products to you and including a link that will direct you to their websites. You will start to wonder where they got your phone number from.
You can think back to the several job openings that you applied for but did not get any feedback. These jobs would ask for you full names, email address, phone number, amongst other personal details that they might use to contact or target you for email marketing.
These days, they send phone texts making it difficult to unsubscribe from such since it is easier to unsubscribe from unsolicited emails or spam messages.
Multi-level Marketing
The two reasons mentioned above are peculiar to online activities. Another reason has to do with traditional marketing, i.e., physical marketing.
This one requires the perpetrators to invite you for an interview which would later become a session for motivation and inspirational talks to convince you into networking and multi-level marketing (MLM).
This is also is hardly endangering provided it is just that – MLM and networking. They have a brand, most times, a supplement or medication company or other types of MLMs. They will try to convince you that a 9-5 job is not going to get you to that dream life you have always fantasized about.
For a moment, some innocent or “hardly-experienced” jobseekers are “brainwashed” and fall into the traps of these people.
Most people get out when these evil people start talking about fees. However, they might still sell off your data to companies that will subsequently target your email or your phone number via bulk SMS for their marketing purpose.
Criminal Activities
The last and most dangerous of the reasons for posting fake job adverts is to lure individuals to hideous locations to kidnap, rob, or kill them. According to Statista, the percentage of internet audience between the ages of 18-34 years that is the target for social media advertising is 65.80%.
This age bracket is the most likely age where people search for jobs – whether fresh or an upgrade to their current roles.
The publisher of fake job adverts posted has recognized that the rate of unemployment or under-employment is very high in the country. Take for instance, the immigration recruitment in 2014 that resulted in a stampede. It is safe to assume that not all those that were there were without a job.
Some of these people do not have the right employment and are seeking for jobs with better remuneration. Kidnappers, armed robbers, harvesters of body parts know the unemployment situation of the country and are taking advantage of it to perpetrate their evil acts.
They know that all they need to do is create a job advert and publish it. They even go as far as paying some popular brands or media to advertise these roles.
It takes a discerning and enlightened mind to identify such adverts and avoid them.
In our subsequent article, we will mention some ways that we can use to identify these fake jobs and totally avoid paying heed to them.