How to recognise a suspicious job advert

Recruitment fraud works because it arrives when you most want good news. The people running it are practised, the messages look professional, and the pressure to decide quickly is deliberate. This guide covers the warning signs and the checks that protect you.

The one rule that stops most of it

A legitimate employer never asks you to pay money to get a job. Not for training, not for an identity card, not for a uniform, a medical, a laptop, a courier fee, a form, a seminar or a “processing charge” that will be refunded with your first salary. If money is requested at any point before you are employed, stop there.

The same applies to payments dressed up as something else: buying a product to qualify, paying a “registration” fee to an agent, or being asked to receive money in your account and send part of it on. That last one is money laundering, and the account holder is the person who gets into trouble.

Warning signs in the advert

• Pay that is far above the going rate for the work, with vague duties.
• No named organisation, or a name that does not appear anywhere else online.
• A free email address for applications rather than a company domain.
• No specific duties or requirements, just “smart candidates needed, no experience required”.
• Urgency: “limited slots”, “interview today”, “reply within one hour”.
• Poor spelling and grammar in an otherwise formal advert.
• An offer of employment with no interview at all.
• Contact only through a messaging app, with no phone number or office address.

Check the employer yourself

Five minutes of checking is worth more than any promise in the message.

• Search the organisation’s name with the words “scam” and “fraud” and see what comes back.
• Find their own website and check whether the vacancy appears there too.
• Compare the email domain with the website address, letter by letter. Fraudsters register lookalike domains with one character changed.
• Call the organisation on a number you found yourself, not one given in the message, and ask whether the role and the person contacting you are real.
• Check that the office address exists and belongs to them.

Protect your information

Your CV can carry your name, phone number, email address and the city where you live. That is all an employer needs at application stage.

Never send the following to apply for a job: your BVN, your bank account details, your card number or PIN, a one-time password, copies of your identity documents, or your date of birth and mother’s maiden name. A real employer asks for bank and identity details after you have accepted a written offer, through their own human resources process, and never by chat message.

Be equally careful with links. Do not enter your email password into a “candidate portal”, and do not install software or open attachments sent by someone you have not verified.

During the interview stage

A fraudulent process often moves entirely through chat: a short text interview, an immediate offer, then a request for payment or documents. Treat those steps as one pattern rather than three separate events.

Be cautious about interviews arranged at private residences, at odd hours, or somewhere that is not an office. If you attend an interview anywhere unfamiliar, tell someone where you are going and when you expect to be back, and keep your phone charged. Your safety matters more than a role.

If something feels wrong

Stop replying. You do not owe an explanation, and pressure to respond quickly is itself a warning sign. If you have already sent money or documents, contact your bank straight away and report the matter to the police.

Every vacancy on Brix Job is reviewed before it is published, and we remove anything reported to us that breaks our rules. A review is a check, not a guarantee, so keep applying the tests above. If you see something suspicious on the site, report the vacancy with the link and what concerned you, and we will look into it.