New figures from City of London Police say the number of people reporting recruitment scams to Action Fraud increased more than eightfold, with the amount of money reported stolen via recruitment scam texts and WhatsApp messages jumping from £20,000 to nearly £1 million in the past year. However, this may just be "the tip of the iceberg", according to City of London Police Temporary Commander Oliver Shaw, as this type of fraud is "hugely underreported".

Recruitment scams involve criminals luring victims with the promise of extra work or income before conning them out of bank details or taking control of their phones to steal money.

18-year-old Bella Betterton from Devon fell for a recruitment scam and had £3,000 stolen from her. Scammers had first contacted her via WhatsApp messages and phone calls. The scammers carried out what Bella thought was a genuine interview with her over the phone for a remote working job involving her using their money to buy and review products. The criminals groomed Bella with dozens of messages and phone calls until they placed what she suspects was malware on her phone, to make four large card payments to an unidentified cryptocurrency exchange. Scammers might ask for small amounts of money upfront, which they claim will be reimbursed in a victim’s first pay cheque for genuine things - such as DBS checks, security checks, and small bits of equipment.

Dr Elisabeth Carter, a criminologist at Kingston University, who is also an expert in the language and phrases fraudsters use to trick their victims, says recruitment scams are a high-volume, multi-stage crime. "These text messages will only be relevant to a certain number of people... but it's a numbers game. Criminals only need a few people to respond, and the victims are self-selecting.

"Fraudsters will take a victim through several stages, things you'd typically expect an HR department to be asking - name, address, date of birth, bank details.

"All that stuff is valuable data in itself, so even if that case doesn't turn into fraud, it's valuable data they can sell on the dark web."

Many staffing firms have signed up to the Jobsaware scheme which is part of a law enforcement and UK government taskforce to tackle the issue. The initiative followed the growth of recruitment scams during the pandemic. So far, almost 500 UK recruiters promote JobsAware to their candidates and more than half a million online job adverts a day display the JobsAware logo.