With the chronic shortage of qualified workers, many Swiss employers are actively looking to hire new staff.

They advertise vacant positions online, opening the door to scammers to post fake job adverts of their own.

Increasingly, scammers are disguising themselves as legitimate employers to obtain sensitive personal information from job seekers.

“Around a quarter of all job offers are fakes,” said Jean-Philippe Spinas, director at Kienbaum Executive Search in Zurich recruitment consultancy.

Specifically, scammers pretend to be HR managers and publish fake job offers in order to obtain sensitive personal and financial information about people who send in their applications.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between real and fake offers,” Spinas added.

What are the scammers looking for?

As any legitimate employer does, fraudsters also ask candidates to send in the curriculum vitae (CV), which normally contains a lot of personal data that scammers are after: telephone number, email address, date of birth, and address. This information is then used to deduce passwords or to create a digital profile.

In the ‘best’ case, you will have to put up with unwanted calls, spam, or other contact attempts.

But under the worst-cast scenario, fraudsters will steal your identity and pretend to be you when setting up telecom and other accounts, because when contacted by phone, you are usually only asked for your date of birth, mobile number, or similar information to identify yourself — all of which scammers have obtained from your CV.

How can you protect yourself?

The key word here is ‘vigilance’.

Identity check

Just as employers vet candidates, you too should ‘screen’ the interviewer.

Your first red flag should go up if the ‘employer’ doesn’t identify him / herself or the company clearly, allowing you to verify their legitimacy.

“Ideally, the job offerer should identify themselves to the candidate,” Jean-Philippe Spinas pointed out.

If they give only minimal information about themselves, or are dodgy in their answers, ask the ‘employer’ to contact you via Linkedin. The platform can be used to determine whether the company, and the recruiter, are real.

Don’t disclose too much

“In the age of online applications on the most diverse platforms, you should always ask yourself: how much data will I reveal during my first contact with the employer?” Spinas said.

If a lot of private information is requested from candidates online, this should arouse suspicion.

For that reason, you should not send your CV, which contains personal details — including, typically, a photograph that can then be copied and used for illicit purposes — to unidentified / unverified employers.

READ ALSO: How to write the perfect CV for a job in Switzerland 

This is the latest employment scam that is widespread in Switzerland right now.

But ‘older’ ones are still circulating around the country.

For instance, the scammers are contacting their victims via messaging services such as Whatsapp and Telegram, presenting themselves as job recruiters who seek people in Switzerland who can work from home.

So far it sounds legitimate, except that “candidates are lured by promises of extraordinary earnings that are disproportionately high relative to the nature of the tasks to be performed,” according to the the National Centre for Cybersecurity (NCSC), which monitors faudulent activities online.

Problems begin after recruitment, when candidates are directed to a platform where they must register to obtain assignments. “It is an imitation of a legitimate website,” explains the federal authority.

All salary and bonus payments must be settled via this fake platform and recruited workers must pay most of the fees themselves.

You can find out about this, and other scams perpetrated in Switzerland, here.

And this article also provides valuable information about how not to fall victim to various scams:

READ ALSO: How to avoid the most common online scams in Switzerland