We've all seen them - the ads that read, "The perfect job awaits and it'll only cost you $59.99 to get your foot in the door and then you'll make your investment back tenfold!"

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Most likely it's a scam. As a general rule of thumb, if something sounds too good to be true and, if someone overly sells that there are "no strings" attached, there are probably strings attached.

New Yorkers are falling hard for employment scams, so hard that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) fired up its Scam Tracker and dropped a bunch of figures to prove to us just how much we're falling for scams that in the end will not bring the fortune they promise.

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In the first three months of 2023, the BBB says that job scams are up 250 percent compared to the same time in 2022. 250 percent!

It would seem that after people got a taste of the work from home or remote life, more and more people have decided that they don't want to go back into the office which has caused the searches for remote opportunities to jump and scammers are loving that victims are falling right into their laps.

According to the BBB, people lost an estimated $840,000 on job scams so far in 2023 which is more than was lost during the first nine months of 2022. The average amount a person is scammed is just over $1,500 however, there are some poor souls that have seen losses totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars.

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Younger people are the ones getting hit the hardest as they search for remote job opportunities with the average job scam victim falling between the ages of 18 and 34 Online sites are playing a big role in the whole scam operation. Over 700 Scam Tracker reports show that Indeed, LinkedIn, and Telegram are the biggest platforms the fraudsters target people on.

If you're looking for a remote job, there are some things that the BBB says you can do to protect yourself. The first is to research the company offering a job through the BBB website. Another thing you can do is search for a phone number for the business and call it to confirm that the job offer is legitimate.

Don't give out your personal information to sneaky online recruiters or through online applications until you've confirmed the legitimacy of the company and the job opening. And above all else, do not ever, ever pay for a job.

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