Attorney General Tong Cautions College Students and Job Seekers to Beware of Job Recruitment Scams

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08/28/2025

Attorney General Tong Cautions College Students and Job Seekers to Beware of Job Recruitment Scams

(Hartford, CT) -- As college students return to campus, Attorney General William Tong is urging students to beware of job recruitment scams targeting young job seekers. The Office of the Attorney General has received numerous complaints regarding emails and unsolicited texts promising part-time, remote employment “opportunities,” often for well-known companies (e.g. Tesla, Indeed.com). These messages may promise highly flexible schedules and high earnings for very few hours of work. Some messages may even appear to be from trusted contacts.

“If you receive an unsolicited text or email dangling an ‘employment opportunity’ or interview that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you haven’t applied for the job, don’t recognize the company, or the hours and pay seem unrealistic, do not respond and report the scam,” said Attorney General Tong.
Hallmarks of scam job texts and emails include:

• Messages sent from phone numbers or email addresses that are not associated with the company named in the message. For example:

Note that other email addresses may look legitimate at first glance, but closer inspection reveals a misspelling of the company name, an incorrect top-level domain (e.g. .us instead of .com) or that the email address is fake (hovering your mouse over the sender’s name can reveal the true sending account).

• Text messages that come from foreign country codes even though they advertise U.S.-based jobs and texts that arrive outside normal U.S. business hours.
• Salaries that sound too good to be true, as well as the designation of salaries being paid in U.S. dollars.
• Requests that you respond via a messaging service, such as WhatsApp.
• Scammers may also try to instill a sense of urgency with the hope that you’ll respond without thinking it through or vetting the communication with someone you trust (e.g. “We have only three openings left”).

The Scammer’s Objective

The scammer’s objective could be getting you to disclose sensitive personal information, such as a Social Security number, in a so-called job application or having you pay an application fee. Some scammers will send a check to deposit at your bank and ask you to send a portion of the check’s value to another account or to purchase job supplies from a link supplied by the scammers. The fake check will bounce, and your bank will ask you to repay the money you withdrew and charge you a fee for the bounced check.

What if the communication seems legitimate?

Scammers can be very sophisticated, and some may use social media and other online information to craft messages that sound real and are tailored to you. If you believe that an unsolicited job recruitment communication could be legitimate, take the following steps to protect yourself:

1. If the job opportunity purports to be from a well-known company or person in your community, reach out directly using official contact information, not the information provided in the message.
2. Check with your school’s career services office, which will have legitimate job listings and may also have direct lines of communication to the company’s human resources department.
3. Look up the name of the company or person plus the words “scam,” “review,” or “complaint” to see what others say about them. You can also Google “scam job text” and the company’s name.
4. If you “get” a job after responding to an unsolicited text, you should receive an offer letter on company letterhead setting forth the terms and conditions of employment. If you do not receive one, the job offer was a scam.

Reporting Unsolicited Texts and Calls

The Office of the Attorney General is part of the Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force, a coalition of 50 bipartisan attorneys general cracking down on providers who allow illegal communications to be routed through their networks. To report a scam call or text, please file a complaint at www.ct.gov/agcomplaints. Our complaint portal is enabled to gather robocall and robo-text specific complaint data.

Sample Scam Texts

Below are examples of scam job texts that were forwarded to the Office of the Attorney General:

Twitter: @AGWilliamTong

Facebook: CT Attorney General

Media Contact:

Elizabeth Benton
elizabeth.benton@ct.gov

Consumer Inquiries:

860-808-5318
attorney.general@ct.gov