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Inside a job scam: Reporter spends $96 to expose fraudster tactics [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2025-08-07

A reporter who purposely fell for a job scam spent $96 to discover exactly how job scam fraudsters milk their victims — by building trust through endless texts and manufacturing urgent fees to "unlock" fake earnings.

When Slate's Alexander Sammon responded to a sketchy text promising $400/day for "remote product testing," he met "Cathy," a handler who masterfully mixed encouragement with pressure. She guided him through mindless clicking tasks on a bogus music streaming site while slowly extracting Bitcoin payments.

What makes these scams effective isn"t technological sophistication but psychological manipulation. Cathy texted Sammon daily greetings, shared personal stories, and praised his work. When he tried withdrawing his "earnings," she demanded ever-larger Bitcoin payments to "unlock" the funds.

The human touch proved crucial — even after Sammon confronted Cathy about running a scam, she simply sent a new website URL and continued messaging as if nothing happened. In an era of AI advancement, old-fashioned social engineering remains a scammer's most potent tool.

"Here I had been clicking in the same place on a fake website every day and texting furiously, with a real person, both of us sort of lying about our true motivations," Sammon says.

Previously:

• Father of 2 young boys loses $5 million after falling for terrifying new Google scam

• The story of this scam bestseller is far better than the book itself

• These scam robot dog ads are so bad they're actually kind of amazing

• PSA: Digital scammers will try to scam you

• Scammers are putting fake QR codes on parking meters in California

• How the 'tech support' scam works

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/07/inside-a-job-scam-reporter-spends-96-to-expose-fraudster-tactics.html

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