The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says scams will often start with an out-of-the-blue WhatsApp message, and then offer victims a false sense of security with small payments once they start work.

The Federal Trade Commission said there were no task scams in 2020, there were 5,000 in 2023 and then task scams quadrupled by the first half of 2024.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has seen an alarming rise in gamified job scams over the past year. The FTC says that reports of job scams have quadrupled each year since 2022 topping out at 20,000 reports at a cost of $41 million in total during the first six months of the year.