Job hunting is difficult. It’s time consuming, it often requires dozens upon dozens of applications, and even if you’re lucky enough to get an interview you have to hope you provide the exact set of critieria that the employer is looking for. Remote work, especially part-time remote work, is a vanishing beast.

It’s no surprise that scammers take advantage of this. There are several types of job scams, but this one especially catches the desperate and lazy. It’s called a task scam.

The scam usually goes something like this:
1) You see an ad or get contacted by a recruiter for a 100% remote job.
2) Your contact offers you a job doing something like “data optimization” or straight out says there are tasks that you will do to get a salary. No matter which it is, the money is way out of line for the work you’ll be doing, such as clicking a button or rating a random product.
3) There will be a trainer who will set you up to learn the ropes and have you train under their account. Each item is worth a certain amount of money, and for some reason, if the product is more than what you’ve accumulated, you’ll be asked to add more money so that you can continue earning commission.
4) The trainer will “square things” so that you can continue on your tasks.
5) You’ll be set on your own, but this time you have to add your own real money to get the commission. Of course, none of this is real - except any money they extract from you.

How to protect yourself
First of all, random recruiters are not going to reach out to you personally out of the blue to offer you a job, even if they’ve ‘read your resume’ or similar.

Especially for remote jobs. They’re in high demand - typically hundreds of applicants. Most legit remote work is going to be highly specialized stuff, not entry level jobs that anybody can do. Companies hiring remote workers are not going to hire people on the spot and set them working. They’re going to require on-camera interviews and lots of questions to make sure they’re hiring the right people.

Also look at the amount you can make in comparison to what you’re being expected to do. While it is not impossible to find entry level piecemeal online work (for example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in its heyday before AI), the money you’re getting paid is going to amount to maybe $5-10 a month picking up small tasks. Not 1500/week for 5-7 hours worth of work.