- Scamsters try to lure university pupils with high salaries, work from home and no requirements of previous work experience or higher education
Hong Kong students struggle to spot real jobs among bogus ones amid rise in scams. Photo: Shutterstock Third-year university student Samra Zulfaqar kept getting messages on social media from “recruiters” claiming she could make HK$700 (US$90) an hour by tutoring at a Hong Kong primary school.
Some of the messages promised high salaries, work from home and required no experience or higher education – which all sounded too good to be true for the exchange student from New Zealand’s University of Auckland.
“Sometimes I receive these messages three times a month or even three times a week,” the 20-year-old said. “I received so many of them that I eventually blocked all of these users. Now I don’t receive such scam messages any more.”
Zulfaqar is one of the lucky ones. Hong Kong recorded nearly 350 cases of employment fraud in May, the largest number in a single month. Fifty students were among the victims.
The number of incidents also represented a 60 per cent increase from the 217 cases logged in April.
Lawmaker Johnny Ng Kit-chong warned students to be cautious when looking at job listings that promised high salaries but required no experience.
“Young people should never believe that high salaries can be earned through little to no work. That’s not how Hong Kong works, and I believe people should take extra care about this issue,” he said.
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The legislator advised students to check such messages for any company addresses and compare them with those listed on the website of Hong Kong’s Companies Registry.
Ng also told students to be especially wary of “employers” who asked for a deposit before starting a job.
“Most companies will never ask you to pay in order to let you work for them,” he said.
Zulfaqar said the bogus recruiters often used informal greetings such as “hi” or “hey”, before sending a vague job description. “They will later reveal their higher salary if you decide to respond and negotiate with them,” she said.
Some suspected scammers also attempted to push Zulfaqar to share her bank details and other personal information, despite her not saying whether she was interested in accepting any offers.
Athena Lee*, a first-year psychology student at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), said the large number of bogus job offers she had received meant she no longer trusted any recruiters who tried to contact her on social media platforms.
She recalled that while hunting for part-time jobs in May, she frequently received WhatsApp messages claiming to offer positions such as managing officers and public relations specialists.
“Some recruiters don’t show the salary on the job listing right away though,” the 18-year-old said.
“They will usually chat with you, build rapport with you and then show you their high salary offer, hoping you will agree with them to join their company after they’ve been friendly with you. This is a common strategy that online job scammers use.”
Lee even found herself caught up in an “in-person employment scam” earlier this year after a classmate asked her for a cash loan and subsequently offered her a job.
“This classmate of mine didn’t have his business licence, he just claimed to have a start-up company himself,” she said.
She even visited his office in a car park basement near Mong Kok East, which she described as “huge, yet eerily blank”.
Her classmate kept saying: “Don’t worry, we won’t scam you!”
But after getting a bad feeling about the offer, Lee made her excuses, rushed from the car park basement and never looked back.
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She later learned that some social media users had accused the company of running a pyramid scheme.
Lee said that like so many other students, she was just looking for a part-time summer job before the incident.
“I couldn’t believe that scams and frauds can happen so close to us, even on campus grounds,” she said. “This whole incident taught me to never trust job recruiters fully, even if they are your acquaintances and you know them well in person.”
Nellie Gaiger, a first-year politics student at HKU, also expressed concerns about the increasing number of online job scams.
She said she hoped to find some work that fitted around her plans to head to England for the rest of the summer, but struggled to trust even messages coming from professional networking platform LinkedIn.
“They tried to offer me jobs that make a passive income, with no experience and university degree required,” she said.
Gaiger said she was vigilant when looking over job posts, meaning she could usually spot scammers but struggled to know which adverts were credible.
“Seeing how common these fraud cases are discourages me from believing real job advertisements, and deters me from applying to them.”
In February, Hong Kong police upgraded their “Scameter” platform so that the search engine could better help users identify online and offline scams.