The most effective recruitment scams do not look like scams. They look like a good week. A recruiter reaches out about a role that fits, the salary is strong without being absurd, the company name is one you recognise, and the process moves quickly because, they explain, the client needs someone on site by month end.
That is the design. Fraudulent offers are built to arrive at the exact moment your judgement is weakest: when you want the job.
The scale of it is no longer marginal. Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre recorded 4,461 reports of recruitment scams in 2025 with losses above $14 million, up from 3,349 reports the year before. Reports from people aged 24 and under rose from 377 to 877 in a single year, a 132 per cent increase. Similar patterns are visible wherever international hiring is active, and cross-border candidates are disproportionately targeted, because the distance makes verification feel harder than it actually is.
It is not harder. It takes about twenty minutes, and it works.
The one rule that catches most recruitment scams
You should never pay money to get a job. Not a placement fee, not a visa processing fee, not a training bond, not a refundable deposit for equipment, not a charge to “secure” your position ahead of other applicants.
This is not simply good practice. In the United Arab Emirates, Federal Decree-Law No. 33 of 2021 prohibits recruitment agencies from charging job seekers at all; recruitment and visa costs sit with the employer and cannot be recovered from the worker. Legitimate agencies across our markets operate the same way. Bantu is paid by employers, and candidates are never charged to find work, in Australia, in Africa, or anywhere else we recruit.
If money is asked of you at any point, the conversation is over. There is no legitimate version of that request.
Check the domain, character by character
The most common technique in international recruitment scams is not a fake company. It is a real company with a slightly wrong address.
Scammers register domains that survive a glance: a swapped letter, an added hyphen, .co where the real domain ends in .com, or a national suffix that looks plausible for the market. Read the part of the email address after the @ symbol one character at a time, out loud if it helps, and compare it against the domain on the company’s official website, one you navigated to yourself, not one you reached by clicking a link in the message.
Free webmail is a hard stop. No established agency runs its hiring from a Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo address, however professional the signature block looks.
Verify the business, not the person
Anyone can produce a convincing profile photograph and a title. Business registration is considerably harder to fake, and it is public.
- In Australia, look the company up on ABN Lookup. A real business will give you its ABN without hesitation. Bantu’s is ABN 62 113 226 298.
- In Zambia, check registration through PACRA.
- In the UAE, recruitment agencies must be licensed by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. Ask for the licence and check it.
Then call the company on a number you found independently, from its own website or the register, and ask whether the person who contacted you works there. Never use the number in the email signature. If the contact is genuine, this takes two minutes and nobody minds. Recruiters who have nothing to hide are not offended by diligence.
Insist on seeing a face
A genuine international hiring process will involve at least one video conversation before an offer. Fraudulent ones tend to stay in text: WhatsApp, Telegram, or email only, with reasons that sound reasonable in isolation, the manager is travelling, the client prefers written communication, the time zones are difficult.
Ask for a video call with the person who would be your manager. Reluctance is information.
Read the offer for what it does not say
A real employment offer is specific and it is boring. It names the legal entity employing you, the exact job title, the salary and currency, the hours, the location, the start date, the probation terms and the notice period.
Fraudulent offers are vague in ways that are easy to miss when you are excited: a brand name instead of a legal entity, a salary range instead of a figure, “competitive benefits” instead of terms, no named signatory.
In the UAE there is an additional check available to you. Employment there begins only once the contract is registered with MOHRE, and the registered contract must mirror the offer you accepted. If someone is asking you to travel on the strength of a document that has no path to registration, something is wrong.
Watch the tempo
Urgency is the mechanism. Recruitment scams almost always introduce a deadline that does not survive scrutiny: the position closes tomorrow, the visa slot expires tonight, another candidate is waiting on the same seat.
Real hiring has deadlines too, but they bend for a reasonable question. If a request for one more day to verify something is met with pressure rather than an answer, you have learnt what you needed to know.
An offer that is genuine on Tuesday is still genuine on Thursday. That is the whole test.
If you think you have been targeted
Stop communicating and keep everything, messages, documents, payment records, the profile that contacted you. If you have sent money, contact your bank immediately; speed genuinely matters. In Australia, report it to Scamwatch. If someone has used Bantu’s name, tell us directly so we can act on it.
And do not carry any embarrassment about it. Recruitment scams are run by professional, well-resourced operations designed by people who do this full time. Being targeted says nothing about your judgement. Checking anyway is what protects you.
You can read more on our recruitment fraud page, see current openings on the Bantu jobs board, or find out what to have ready before an international recruitment conversation.
