RResidents in Japan

Keep getting scammy job offers through Whatsapp, but I don’t understand how they are scamming.

I keep getting messages through Whatsapp (I assume they’re getting my phone number through my LinkedIn?).

These people always claim they are recruiters for a job that pays full time salary for only 30-60 minutes of work a day, and it’s fully remote. They say all I need is access to internet and a Japanese bank account. Here’s their description of the work:

“Work content:
Our work optimizes and improves the product data of [the] company. The sales ranking, popularity and exposure of products on online platform stores will increase. We optimize 2 groups a day, and a group has 45 products for a total of 90 times, so we can earn optimization commissions.”

Does anyone else get these? When I google their recruitment agency names, nothing ever comes up. But when I google the company they’re hiring for, it looks like a legit company. I just don’t understand how the scam works, if it’s a scam.

18 comments

  1. They will first ask you to do some random stuff like liking some posts or comments on social media and will actually give you the (small) rewards to gain your trust and make you believe it’s not a scam.

    After a few rounds they will start ask you to perform some tasks that require you to prepaid with your money , usually crypto stuff, e.g. manipulate the price of some cryptocurrency. This is the scam and you will never get your money back. If you ask, they will say there’s some technical error or something and ask you to repeat, I.e. give them more money.

  4. Me too, recently, like a few times per week. My phone number isn’t on LinkedIn by the way. I’ve been tempted to reply with ‘fuck off’ but the best way to deal with them is to ignore and hit the block and report button. If everyone does this they’ll be too busy having to create new accounts all the time and will have less time for scamming people.

  5. Phishing, essentially.

    They are scammers fishing for leads. If you respond to the bait(job offer), that is enough for them to hook you and confirm you are a real target. There are layers to the game and the end goal is to steal your identity.

  7. Same.
    They all fake and shit. I just straight block and report all of them and set whatsapp to silence unknown calls.

  9. Me too. All the time.
    Started a few weeks ago and won’t stop both on my personal phone and work phone.
    Funniest part is the companies are always ‘based in Japan’ here for Japanese jobs but the numbers are always from the most random places. Peru, Mexico, China, Mongolia, Antarctica base 1…

  11. It’s a task scam. I told a lot of my Japanese coworkers about this,but as far as I can tell, they haven’t gotten any Japanese language ones going yet, but it’s nice to see they are trying to get English speakers in Japan.

    They are huge right now, seemingly coming out of nowhere. Many people aren’t aware of them so they are pulling in tons of money. They often will let people withdraw a few hundred bucks or even a thousand at first so they believe that it’s the real deal.

    There are daily posts about them on the scams subreddit.

    AutoModerator has been summoned to explain task scams. Task scams involve a website or mobile app that claims you can earn money by completing easy tasks, such as watching a video, liking a post, or creating an order. The app will tell you that you can earn money for each task, but the catch is that you can only do a limited number of tasks without upgrading your account. To upgrade your accounts, the scammers will require you to pay a fee. The goal of this scam is to get people to download the app for easy money and then encourage them to pay to get to the next level. It’s impossible to get your “earnings” out of the app, so victims will have wasted their time and money. Thanks to redditor vignoniana for this script.

    *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please* [*contact the moderators of this subreddit*](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/Scams) *if you have any questions or concerns.*

  12. Yeah this is going around, I posted on linkedin about it and many people say the same. Someone here said that one of the major recruit agencies had a data leak, so that might be how they got your info.

  13. I don’t post my phone number in LinkedIn but still get these. I started to get a lot just a month ago and I can’t recall where I entered my phone number during that time but that is definitely the culprit. Do they tell you all this info from the first message though? Mine are more generic, baiting a response. But since I don’t reply, I never find out what the play is.

  16. I keep getting this weird “scam?” Recently where they literally just call my phone. I dont even have time to pick up usually ive traced the phone numbers to somewhere in africa and im pretty sure it started since i got on linkedin. I dont even get the point because i literally dont have time to pick up. Its weird as fuck.

Leave a Reply
— Previous article

Curious about the current permanent residency process times (Osaka specifically).
Next article —

Need help identifying this fish

You May Also Like