Ghost Jobs and Fake Recruiters: How to Spot a Job Scam in 2026

My friend almost paid 45 euros to a stranger last month. She had applied for a logistics coordinator role in Rotterdam, and a few days later a WhatsApp message arrived from someone using the company logo as her profile picture. Polite, specific, well written. The only odd part was the request: send a photo of your passport and a small onboarding fee, and the interview would be scheduled for Thursday.

The company was real. The logo was real. The vacancy existed. None of that made the recruiter real.

The scam stopped looking like a scam

Five years ago you could spot a fake job offer from the grammar. A badly translated email, a Gmail address, a salary that made no sense. That era is over. Scammers use the same writing tools as everyone else now, clone careers pages down to the cookie banner, and lift real job descriptions from LinkedIn. Some run text interviews that feel more organised than the ones you get from actual employers.

At the same time, a duller problem has grown: ghost jobs. An ad stays online for months, gets reposted every few weeks, and nobody is actually hiring. Sometimes a company is building a pipeline. Sometimes a manager wants to look busy. Occasionally it is just a system nobody remembered to close.

Six things a real recruiter never does

Not every strange message is a crime. But a legitimate recruiter will not do any of these:

1. Ask you for money. Not for training, not for equipment, not for a background check, not for a visa. The employer pays. There is no exception worth arguing about.
2. Request your passport or bank details before a signed offer. In the EU and the UK you also have the right to ask what data is held and why. A real recruiter answers that without drama.
3. Interview you by text only. Chat is fine for scheduling. At some point a human voice or a face should appear.
4. Write from a lookalike domain. Compare the part after the @ with the company's real website, letter by letter. acme-careers.com is not acme.com, however convincing the display name looks.
5. Push a 24-hour deadline. Urgency is the oldest tool in the box. Real hiring teams know that people have notice periods and families.
6. Send an offer with no address, no registration number and nobody you can call back. If the letter cannot survive a phone call to the switchboard, it is not an offer.

The quieter problem: ghost jobs

Fake recruiters steal money and data. Ghost jobs steal something less visible: weeks of your time and a bit of your confidence. You spend an evening tailoring a CV for a role that was filled internally in September.

A few practical checks help. Does the ad show a salary band? A named hiring manager? A date that changes every month? Is the same job advertised by three agencies with three different pay ranges? None of these proves anything alone. Together they tell you where to spend your energy.

The fastest test is a question. Ask who the role reports to and what the first ninety days should look like. A real hiring manager answers in detail. A ghost job produces a vague paragraph, or silence.

If you have already given them something

• Stop the conversation and stop any payment immediately. Do not send one last document to unlock a refund.
• Call the company on the number from its official website, not the one in the message, and ask whether that recruiter works there.
• In the EU and the UK, send a data protection request asking what personal data is held and asking for its deletion.
• If you shared an ID or bank details, tell your bank the same day and report it to the police where you live.

Ten minutes of checking beats an hour of regret

I have a small ritual before any interview. I search the recruiter's name together with the company. I open the company's own careers page and look for the same vacancy there. If the details do not match, I call the switchboard and ask. It takes about ten minutes, and it has saved me from two wasted afternoons.

Scammers rely on speed. They count on you being excited, or desperate, or both. Slowing down is not paranoia. It is the cheapest filter available.

The real recruiter will still be there tomorrow. The fake one usually will not.