Don’t Apply for These Amazon Job Scams – They Are Fake

Jobs certainly require qualification. When working for such a successful brand like Amazon, human resources need enough time to make the right recruitment decision.

It can be hard to choose who will join the team and who to reject. Because the Amazon team thinks long term, they don’t just accept anybody. Good is the enemy of Great.

Do you like the job?

How much time can you commit?

Do you qualify for this position with your background and skills?

Fake Amazon jobs, however, are work-from-home traps. Imagine you browse for money opportunities and find a well-paid position on Amazon, no skills required. You apply, and they approve it in no time!

After reviewing your application, the employer puts you on a testing stage. If you prove you can manage the workload well, they hire you.

Here, a grey area appears. Since you have no skills, you need to pass a test to show you’re a good fit. But you neither want to spend days working for free.

Welcome to the fake Amazon jobs board! Here, scammers promise everyone $6000+/mo paychecks for an easy 4h workweek. Ironically, you never get out of the testing stage. You complete free projects and perhaps buy professional kits only to get the job. It should be worth it.

After your delayed gratification hits its limits, you doubt: What if they never give me the job? What am I doing wrong? What if it doesn’t exist? You guessed it.

Amazon Job Scams: Exploiting The Committed

Those who need money the most are the easiest ones to scam. It’s not rare to find gurus making money by promising others money. Perhaps you make money, just not the way you expected.

Needless to say, none of these jobs come from the actual Amazon. Unless you browsed on the Amazon jobs address, nothing you found is official. Anybody can make up a job position and pose as the retail brand.

Now, Amazon is one of the most profitable companies. Something that looks too good to be true may be considered “normal” in Amazon due to its massive success. If a fake ad says Jezz Bezos is giving $1000 to a hundred random customers every day, most people would believe it. Confidence tricks work better in this brand.

Scammers use these tricks to lure the desperate with fake job offers. These hard workers will do anything to get the job. But once scammers get what they want, they’ll leave them with nothing.

“Since you didn’t pass the job test, we will not be moving forward. We wish you the best for future endeavors.”

Why didn’t they tell you that before submitting all those projects? Before buying all those kits? Rip-off.

Beware of fake Amazon job offers!

Scammers use any known method to make you read their offer: email, LinkedIn, ad campaigns, Facebook, Craigslist, even other freelance platforms. After you click, you’ll likely appear on a cloned site resembling Amazon/jobs. 

None of the listed jobs you find are real. After browsing for a while, you’ll pick the best-looking offer and message the scammer, who poses as an Amazon employer. The scheme begins.

Red Flags

#1 They request too much data early in the application.

You’ve sent the proposal and immediately received a response. The employer wants you to fill up a registration form while they check your request. They may even refuse to revise it until you share your private data with them.

That would only make sense after you’ve secured the job. You have just met the employer and don’t know whether they will hire. “At least they’ll have my data available to contact me for future opportunities.”

They may ask for SSN, ID documents, or banking information. Those are the credentials only trusted people should know. It may look like they’re interested in you when asking this question. Perhaps they only want to steal your identity.

#2 You require training before getting the job

“We have a demanding job that pays great. Although it requires experience, we’re accepting applicants with no skills for a limited time. After all, it’s about attitude, not aptitude. If you’re willing to learn, we will train you for this position, so you can soon be making $10K/mo and beyond!”

Now, nobody said the training was going to be easy. Nor free. Pay for courses here and there, add some kits, maybe consulting. Before you know it, you’ve spent a couple of grand on a job with no hiring opportunity.

It reminds us to advance fee fraud, also the 419 confidence trick. You expect a reward (the position) but never get out of the process (the training).

#3 You need to complete sample/trial projects for them.

If you apply for a skill-based position, you’ll at least improve your skills if you don’t get the job after the trials. However, if it’s only about putting hours on a tedious task, then you’ve just spent precious time for nothing.

Expect exigent employers to ask for trial projects, especially when having many applications. Trials are a smart practice, except when they take advantage of the worker. As a test, applicants should still get paid, at least for half of the usual rate.

Not only do they want it free and personalized. They want you to send many of them as if it was a competition against other applicants.

For the average job, showing your portfolio would have sufficed. But con men want to get projects done for free. They may send fake money instead.

#4 You pay to work

At some point, we’ve all believed that “you need money to make money.” Is it true? A resourceful person has two other options: time and skills (which help to save time).

We’ve seen how employers could take advantage of your time. You’ll also find the ones who base your qualification on how much you spend with them. Even if you pay the most, you still don’t get hired.

Whenever someone is delaying the hiring with last-minute excuses, you may want to question whether the job exists.

#5 Sneaky payment tactics

How to know if it’s fake? Easy: if you don’t get paid, it’s a scam, not a job! After completing work, you should receive the funds via bank transfer, Paypal, or other usual methods. They will never send it in Amazon gift cards, cryptocurrency, or checks.

Fake payments reveal fake jobs. If you’re receiving a check for the first time, you may not know that fraudulent checks cancel after a few weeks. These requests often happen when recruiters hire you as a “payments/funds manager.”

Sending money to your employer isn’t part of the job, but a payment trick.

#6 The job isn’t what you expected

Sure, the job offer looked great from a glance. But as you go through the hiring process, the job starts turning into something different. After finding a dozen undisclosed conditions, the position has nothing to do with the advertisement. Is it worth it?

Your intuition is already warning you that something won’t end up well. If recruiters have already misled you on the job introduction, how not to expect they’ll trick you after hiring? 

You try to justify that feeling you can’t explain, but your rationalization kicks in. “We may not get another job opportunity!” 

#7 Instant hire/No experience needed

You rarely find employers who are desperate to hire someone. Amazon pays well and receives a load of applications daily: recruiters need to take more time to qualify their applicants.

If they hire you in no time— impulsively— don’t wonder if they fire you the same way. Mistakes are expensive when made in an Amazon-scale, and firing the wrong people matters more than hiring the right one.

Exigent recruiters take hundreds of interviews and pick a handful of people. After making a decision, they leave it paused for at least 24-48h, just to double-check they still agree. Instant approvals are either a scam or a mistake.

#8 Easy work, high pay

The work difficulty is relative to your ability. If you’ve been training a valuable skill for years, you may find a high-paid job easy, while others would have no clue. It’s possible to make six figures as an employee, just as it is to get rich quick.

What if anybody could do it? Then, by supply and demand, the skill would be less valued. Easy and valuable isn’t compatible. You might be lucky and get it once, but it won’t last.

You’ll see how those who promise such jobs will try to rip you off. In Amazon, you get paid as much as you value you add to the company.

#9 Investigative Opinion Jobs

Amazon doesn’t pay much for opinions because:

Amazon won’t pay for your thoughts: scammers will. Or so they say.

They may tell you to buy X product, ship it to them, and leave a review. They promise to refund you later plus commissions, but they disappear with the product.

Amazon neither hires “mystery shoppers.” In this fun job, you’d be shopping online for a list of products and sending them to the employer. They give you a starting capital of $1K-$2K to send them products to inspect. When done, you keep the remaining sum as a salary. The more products you ship, the more you get paid.

Did we mention the check? That’s right. Amazon (the imposter), a 100% virtual business, still chooses to spend dollars to deliver a physical payment, when an instant transfer would have worked just fine.

Do yourself a favor. Never accept a check again without knowing this.

Types Of Scams

People usually sign for fake jobs because they sound amazing. Despite the hundreds of jobs available, Amazon prefers skilled people with professional history, which filters many out. Fake jobs give victims the confidence they can complete an easy task and still get paid outrageous amounts.

The job, however, is always about paying/buying. The con man will promise you a generous salary if you follow their instructions on what to do with your money. Buy programs? Exchange fake checks? Deliver goods? We don’t know a single worker that didn’t lose money with payment-scam jobs.

#1 Payments Manager

As a manager, you will receive payments from others and send amounts back with instructed methods. Send it to X person, and the left difference makes your salary.

It may be hard to imagine why someone would pay (and trust) you to handle someone else’s money. As a big company, one doesn’t trust the first person who applies for the “job.” For such simple tasks, you could either do it yourself or buy software that does it.

Such works don’t exist. As a receiver, you don’t see that the money they sent you can revert, or it’s fake. As a sender, they force you to use unsafe payment methods like gift cards, wire transfers, or money orders.

#2 Printing Checks

Now, you’re working with a payroll agency. They offer decent money for printing checks and delivering them to their patrons.

That’s not how legit agencies operate. Instead, you’re working for a scammer and producing fake checks. If you ever get paid, it will depend on how many people the con man scams.

Making money preparing checks is as sketchy as envelope stuffing. Never trust these business models unless you want to scam others like you.

#3 Selling Consulting/Training

When selling a fake job, employers will put countless barriers to prevent you from getting the position. You need to buy this course, get those tools, or complete that project. In the end, they sell you a bunch of stuff with questionable value and reject your application.

Others never plan to give you a job, but disguise info-products instead. If the title is “Make ten thousand dollars per month doing X,” it’s easy to confuse it with an online job. 

All you need to qualify for these is a credit card. You expect a job after submitting the request and buying the products, but you only get the training, nothing else. Something like: “how to get better Amazon jobs.”

Secret society scams use it too. They promise you a position if you buy their products, then you discover the group doesn’t exist.

#4 Emailed Job Offer

When was the last time an Amazon recruiter reached out to you? Let’s say you have no experience, skills, nor online visibility. How is that possible?

An Amazon imposter starts sending emails to random addresses with job offers. (Not) Surprisingly, you qualify for the fund management position, so you give it a try.

What do identity thieves usually do? Phishing:

What is phishing? And how you can protect your sensitive data.

These no-skill high-salary jobs require extensive registration. You need your banking details, Amazon login data, and ID documents only so that they consider you. As you wait for your approval, the thieves are stealing your money and opening new accounts under your name.

This email didn’t come from Amazon Jobs.

#5 Job Identity Theft/ Fraudulent Drop-Servicing

What if you have no money or skills? You can still use the time to make money: flipping products, for example. You can find a marketplace where you can buy for low, find another to sell for more, and pocket the difference.

Drop-servicing eliminates the potential refund issues of drop-shipping. You let someone do the work for you and send it to your employer. 

There are two blindspots with this method:

Imagine a con man wants to work for Amazon Jobs, but he doesn’t qualify. He will pose as Amazon Jobs to some work-from-home victim who meets those conditions. He offers the victim the same job and rate.

Legit drop-servicers give the workers part of the benefits. Instead, con men can send them fake checks. Worse of all? Amazon sees them as a responsible employee and never hears of the third person.

How To Prevent These Job Scams

If you know what Amazon Jobs does or doesn’t do, it becomes easier to spot work-from-home scams.