Remote Work Scams

Fraudsters sometimes offer you deals that sound like golden opportunities, but they are covered in lies and have spiders ready to bite you the moment you accept. A careful fraudster, though, will make it only slightly too good rather than obviously great. They want you excited. They want you ready to accept. But no matter how good or standard it looks — watch out."

I work remotely. I have for a number of years as I have Ehlers-Danlos among other conditions. Hey, we all have our issues, and many of us have more than one. Ehlers-Danlos is difficult to manage. It is a bone connectivity disorder and it can make many professions a challenge, but a body must eat. Kids must be fed, and sometimes that means parents have to rally.

Remote work has made managing my various conditions easier. But remote work offers are far higher in the scam department than brick-and-mortar jobs. I do my best to stick to vetting sites like FlexJobs, but when it is crunch time, I start pulling from elsewhere.

If the company isn't vetted ahead, that means the vetting falls on me. The simplest way I have found that works most of the time is to get the company name and information from whoever contacted me. The fraudster is likely to have given me these clues themselves. But do not trust those links immediately. And be wary, as you will likely have to provide some information to legit companies too. You're not hired without filling out a W-2, but before filling that out you should have an offer letter. Offer letters can be verified with HR. You can verify the employment is something they actually offer. But what if it is through a service provider?

That offer letter should still reflect the real hiring company's name. For sure, I get 90% of scam jobs hitting me when I go to platforms that do no vetting at all. Small companies are harder to check, but the ones the fraudsters are impersonating most these days are drug companies, research firms, and my latest one was in marketing.

You call up HR directly — not with the information the scammer provides, but through your own research. But big crime organizations can make false websites. If they give you a link, you can find out on secure platforms how long that website has been active. Look at the company information — does it align with the website? The website is likely slightly younger than the company if it was born in this modern era.

Companies get their information out there. It is rather simple to create a site. Now, on top of that, no company should send you a check to buy goods directly with their vendors. Never accept that. If they have a vendor, that vendor should be paid directly from them. Next up, if they send you a check, you should still verify the check and then turn it in to the police. It is not a crime for YOU to report if they "misrepresent" a legitimate company. You must be harmed by the act of the other. It's kind of like how we think of doing bad things, but until we actually do it, the crime cannot be prosecuted. How awful would it be if our naughty thoughts got us in trouble, right? Misrepresentation harms the company so it's up to them to pursue it. Still, a crime.

Anyway, call the bank that it's written on and say, "I need to confirm a check before deposit." They might have you go to your bank to do it. I had a cashier's check sent to me. A cashier's check that was FRAUD! Imagine.

I called the bank and said I am confirming a cashier's check written from this bank — this is the number, the amount, and who it was written for. If they try to tell you to deposit with your smartphone, tell them that it didn't work. You can then contact the police and say this person has sent me funds that were fraudulent. That is a crime — money was sent to you. They will advise not to contact the scammer further. Keep the ENVELOPE it was sent in. Get a copy of the check. Send all of it to either the bank the fraud was written on, if requested, as it's a bigger crime for them — it is federal. If that envelope proves they sent it from out of state, it is also a federal crime for you too. Contact the police and don't sit idle.

That fraudster — even if they didn't get you — they will move on. It can be a shot in the dark to catch them. So, not every company is going to have the funds to chase down your lead from HR. But they will take down the email, the phone number that was likely routed and not the fraudster's actual phone.

Now, say you gave out sensitive information. Likely, your social security number and possibly driver's license. Contact the credit bureaus and alert them if you gave your Social Security number or, worse, your driver's license on top. I once had a fraudulent bank account opened. I lock that, folks, unless I am looking for things. I wish it were even more strict.

We now have ID.me. And wouldn't it be awesome if it assigned like a bonus PIN for account opening? You go to ID.me and say, "I am opening up an account at [institution name] — generate a personal PIN for one-time usage." ONE TIME, not open door. Short-lived, lasts three days at most. Why three? Because it will delay things, but it might solve issues. It might cost money too for us to set up accounts. Soft checks on credit scores can still happen, but when we are ready to commit, that is when we verify hard.

You know, check fraud was even more rampant back in the day. Counterfeit bills too. But we learn each time we are bitten by something that got through. Each time we learn another layer of protection.

Like, I had that bank account opened up. So what did I do. I discovered one as they sent me a form for funds paid supposedly to me. You know those funds for Opening account they sometimes give. That involved calling the police and making a report and I didn't pay taxes on that money. But that was ONE bank. There could be others. They told me you can go to ChexSystems and find out if there are accounts opened up in your name. Amazing, right? If you give out personally identifiable information to get work, it can open you up. But we all need to work. We can't box ourselves away out of fear. It's nice in concept, but as I said the body has to eat. Report when you are bitten and learn that added layer to protect yourself and then spread the word on things you discover..

And here's the thing — every security measure you've ever seen on money exists because someone exploited the version that came before it. Take the ridges on coins. Those little grooves on the edge of your quarter? They're called reeding. Back in the 1600s, coins were made from actual gold and silver. People figured out they could shave tiny bits of metal off the edges, spend the lighter coin at face value, and melt down the shavings for profit. It was called coin clipping, and it got so bad in England that by the 1690s, nearly half the silver content was missing from circulating coins. Half. The economy was collapsing over it. Coin clipping was considered high treason — men were hanged for it, women were burned alive. And it still didn't stop.

When the apple hit him, it was a type of bite, but he did learn from it.

So Isaac Newton — yes, that Isaac Newton, hit by an apple and gave us a concept gravity— he was made Warden of the Royal Mint and helped push through the Great Recoinage of 1696. They recalled every coin in the country and reissued them with milled, ridged edges. Now if someone shaved a coin, the missing ridges made it obvious. That's your quarter's edges right there — a security feature born from a national crisis over three hundred years ago.

Paper money has the same kind of story. Benjamin Franklin — the man on the hundred-dollar bill — was one of the first printers of colonial American currency back in the 1730s. Counterfeiting was rampant because there were no standards. So Franklin got creative. He pressed actual leaves into his printing plates because the vein patterns were so intricate that no forger could replicate them by hand. He embedded blue threads and flecks of a glittery mineral called muscovite into the paper itself — think of it as the 1700s version of the hologram on your credit card. He even deliberately misspelled "Pennsylvania" on bills he printed for the colony, so a correctly spelled counterfeit would actually be the one that looked wrong.

And it worked, until the British figured it out during the Revolutionary War and flooded the colonies with counterfeits so good it tanked the economy. "Not worth a Continental" — that phrase came from British counterfeiting destroying trust in American paper money. So after the war, we went back to coins for decades. Didn't trust paper again until the Civil War in 1861, when they started printing greenbacks — and those included colored threads, the same idea Franklin had used a century earlier.

Every layer on modern currency tells this same story. The watermarks you see when you hold a bill to the light? Those are woven into the paper at the mill, not printed on. Can't photocopy them, can't scan them. The security thread that glows under UV light? The color-shifting ink on the number in the corner? The microprinting so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read it? Each one exists because some forger beat the last version.

Checks are the same way. Modern checks have chemical-reactive paper that stains if someone tries to wash and alter them. They have heat-sensitive ink that disappears when you breathe on it and reappears when it cools — a bank teller's quick verification trick. They print "VOID" across any photocopy automatically. Every single one of those features exists because a specific type of fraud forced it into existence.

And that's my whole point with remote work scams. We're still in the early days. We're still in the smooth-edged coin era, where the clippers are having a field day because the ridges haven't been built yet. The safeguards aren't standardized. There's no reeding on the job offer, no watermark on the employment email. So the burden falls on us to be our own Isaac Newton, our own Benjamin Franklin — to build our own protections until the system catches up.

Now let me tell you about stoplights and stop signs, because the same principle applies, and the history behind them is even more personal.

Did you know that every stoplight has a story of someone who paid a price for proving that intersection was dangerous? Maybe not always on that corner, but roads with that much traffic — that light is the result of need. A need to protect vulnerable folks driving, walking, and playing.

And it goes way back. Before stop signs and traffic lights, there was nothing. In the first decade of the 1900s there were no stop signs, no warning signs, no traffic lights, no traffic cops, no driver's education, no lane lines, no street lighting, no brake lights, no driver's licenses, no posted speed limits. Nothing. Streets had been shared public space for centuries — pedestrians, horses, kids playing, everyone just moved freely in every direction. When cars showed up and the chaos got dangerous, cities put police officers out on busy corners to direct traffic by hand. Those officers stood in the middle of the intersection, exposed to weather and the constant threat of being hit, waving people through and trying to keep order with nothing but their hands and a whistle.

The very first traffic light came before cars even existed. In 1868 in London, a railway engineer named John Peake Knight figured if signals could control trains, they could control horse-drawn carriages too. They installed a gas-powered signal outside Parliament — red and green lamps, operated by a policeman. One month later, a gas leak caused the whole thing to explode and severely injured the officer running it. London didn't try traffic lights again for sixty years.

The first stop sign came in 1915 in Detroit — the heart of the automobile industry, because that's where the problem was worst. And here's a detail I love: the man credited with inventing the stop sign, William Phelps Eno, never learned to drive a car in his life. He got the idea watching a horse-drawn traffic jam as a nine-year-old boy in New York City in 1867. He spent his life solving a problem for a machine he never operated. Sometimes the people who see the problem clearest are the ones standing on the sidewalk watching.

But here's what really gets me, and why I bring up stoplights in a blog about fraud. In the 1920s, sixty percent of automobile fatalities nationwide were children under age nine. Kids playing in the street in front of their own homes. In 1922, Baltimore built a twenty-five-foot memorial obelisk inscribed with these words: "Erected by the Citizens of Baltimore in Memory of the 130 Children Whose Lives Were Sacrificed by Accident during the year 1921." One hundred and thirty kids. One city. One year. That's when people finally said enough, that's when the stop signs and lane markings and traffic signals started spreading. Not before the children died. After.

Every safeguard has a body count behind it. The stoplight exists because someone died at that intersection or one like it. The reeding on your quarter exists because an economy collapsed. The watermark on your twenty exists because a forger beat the last version. And the fraud protections we need for remote work? They barely exist yet, because we're still in the "before the stoplight" phase. People are getting burned, losing money, having their identities stolen, and someday the systems will catch up. But right now, today, the vetting falls on us.

Now, a note on the history in this post. I am dyslexic, folks. I can mislabel a year without thinking twice about it, and how wrong would it be if I told you the first stop sing went up in 1951 instead of 1915? Pretty wrong, and my credibility goes with it.

So here's what I did: the historical research and specific dates in this post were found by Claude's Opus 4.6 AI. It was my directions that sent it searching — I knew what I wanted to say about coin crimping, about Franklin's tricks, about stoplights being born from tragedy. I pointed it where to look and told it what to find. Opus did the digging, pulled up the dates and details, and I had them added to my words so the facts are verified.

That's the verification source. I'm transparent about that because this whole post is about protecting yourself, and part of protection is knowing where your information comes from. That fraudster is going to give you something on the surface that looks legit, but take the facts and look for external verification. I use the tools available to me, same as I'm telling you to do.

Now, I am nowhere near desperate. My important bills are paid a full month ahead. My car payment — folks, they offer to let me "skip a payment" if I pay them a small fee. I pay that fee and get added breathing room as I continue to pay the payments. It's a small thing, that skip fee — $30.00 for skipping my Christmas payment each year. I skip it technically, but continue to pay. Now after a few years, I have a few months built up. I am on unemployment and that added buffer built over years of work and still paying that is so beautiful right?

But it's not just my car payment. I am ahead on my rent, but I had to slow-build it. They don't send me it's Chirstmas want to 'delay your' payment. Get it's putting off the payment that skip fee, but it is a great thing they do. If my unemployment runs out, I have a couple months' buffer. Not as much as they tell you to build, but a bit. And I don't use that buffer unless I have no funds to give. And it happens.

The car breaks down — what do you drive while it gets fixed? Do you have more than one vehicle? Some families only have one car. I have been there myself a few times. You coordinate everything, but where you can, build yourself a net as often as you can. And there is assistance if, say, I can't get a job anywhere — and there is NO shame in temporary help or getting needed assistance.

There are so many people with disabling conditions that have deteriorated through time. They might be on Social Security Disability, but I can tell you that my husband retired early due to cancer. His payment is $2,211.00, which is on the high side. And many would be envious. But rent is $1,377 with internet and most utilities. The car payment is $415.00, car insurance $220, electric $100, phone $68... and I can stop right there. Does it cover the essentials of the family? Almost. We are short food, and I haven't hit credit cards or medical bills of a cancer patient. And I am not complaining, just saying — a single person's Social Security in our double-wage-earner society doesn't get you there.

Ah well, it's going to be fine. As I said, I am one of these people that will do whatever job I am capable of doing. I will do it with a smile, grateful to be employed. Won't prevent me from looking for better after a time, but I'm not a job hopper either. You commit, you commit, and try to improve within the company first.

I am nearly out of unemployment from my furlough, the world has been safe for extra time, so delightful. So I do need something. Hmm, maybe we go Lyft and Uber. Dangerous work at times, but I will take legitimate work. There is no job too menial to me. There is no legit work that is not needed.

Lyft and Uber folks are very needed. Buses don't go everywhere. We can't always walk as much as another. The car breaks down and we need to get to work, and maybe your transport doesn't get you there. Or your car breaks down — how difficult is it to take a baby on a bus over a taxi? I can put a car seat in a taxi cab. A bus... ugh, last time it didn't even have a seat belt. Maybe that has changed, hope so, but really I'd take the Uber and Lyft.

Now, are these safeguards enough? Absolutely not. Why? Every time you make a block to a fraudster, they eventually find a way around it. Just like the British figured out Franklin's tricks. Just like forgers learned to cast counterfeit coins even after Newton added the ridges. Just like that first gas-powered traffic light exploded and set the whole idea back sixty years. Plus, sometimes we trust things we shouldn't, especially when desperate. As I mentioned, we find safeguards after getting bitten. Some safeguards exist but are not implemented unless there is a proven need.

Anyway, protect yourself. I find 90% of remote offers from unvetted sites are fraud. I spot them fast with experience. Someday, I will have bonus funds and I plan a website where we can report fraud emails and what they are. Show proof of what we got hit with. Share tips and tricks for spotting, reporting, and catching these criminals. Submit voice recordings of voicemail and any other details. I want someone pooling together patterns. Maybe a nice retired police officer who in his day knew a thing or two and can use a bit extra.

Love our officers in the world. I get some of them are bad pennies too, but suspicion of everyone because I've been bitten is okay. Assuming for certain it is a fraud without vetting it first — I don't do that. No, I first say okay, I have an offer, great. Hope it's legit and start the checks required. If the company legitimately offered the job, you explain that companies are vulnerable to fraud and you make a practice of verifying. And if it isn't fraud, great, but if it is, you give them all the details so they know.

Patterns, folks. Triangulation. Multiple points of detail give us better shots at finding the ones who violate the laws and prey on vulnerable people.

Oh, and folks — did you catch my dyslexic moment that I told Claude to put back in after it corrected it? I originally wrote "stop sing" instead of "stop sign." Stop Sing. Really. I am dyslexic, and think about what that would look like in a piece of historical reference: "The first Stop Sing was in 1951." Ha ha ha. Hilarious. And wrong on two counts. That, right there, is why I verify.

And who knows, folks — probably around some stop sign in 1951 someone stood and sang. Might not have been the first one, but not all of history is documented, and the first becomes the documented moment. Oh man, my sides crack when I get my dyslexic report on all the things I misspelled. :D

So folks, when you're at a stop sign, go ahead and sing a happy song, because that sign is protecting you. It's annoying at times to have to stop, but the alternative is much worse. Inconveniences are not so inconvenient when we realize they're there for good reason.

The AI put the woman in the direct path of the train. She was to be waiting behind the lights. And doesn't she look like she's enjoying herself and signing and waiting. Now wouldn't it be awful if she decided to merrily go about her day and skip the lights that warned her of the dangers. Sometimes when the AI imager fails my directions I look at it deeper. This time I did. She could live a long life had she waited behind the lights right?

Sometimes warning signs are real. I understand, folks. I have been at a train crossing and the lights are false. But every time, you stop, check, listen, wait for a time. It might be the train is stopped along the tracks somewhere, or the signal is faulty. But you won't know. The one time you fail to check, that is when the spider bites you. Sometimes you can recover, but sometimes you don't fully, or at all. A train hitting a car is rarely recoverable.

Fraud has been around for a long time. Sometimes it is started because the person is desperate. Desperation can make us do awful things. I try to think, when I'm bitten, that they were desperate. And from where a lot of fraud is found to originate, those people are for sure desperate. But that doesn't give them the right to bite me.

I must watch for the signs. All of them. Verify and check. But I am that crazy lady singing at a crossroads, always. Sometimes I even shake it. A little joy and exercise never hurt, to my knowledge. Well... sometimes my ehlers can make moving a real challenge, but hey if I can't dance I will sing. If I can't sing I will imagine. Day dreams aren't as powerful as my night ones, but a pause can be a doorway into another world or profound moment.

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