Never trust someone who says they'll pay you just to like things online... as long as you pay them first.
The gamification of text scams skyrocketed in 2024, according to Federal Trade Commission data, contributing to consumers losing hundreds of millions of dollars to schemes they thought were going to pay them instead.
In 2020, the FTC didn’t receive any reports about these so-called task scams. Reports began to trickle in over the next few years to the tune of around 500 in 2021, 1,000 in 2022, and 5,000 in 2023. But this year, the task scam industry took off. During the first half of 2024, the FTC received more than 20,000 complaints.consumers reported losing around $223 million to schemes involving fake jobs in the first half of 2024 and text-based swindles accounted for nearly 40 percent of those losses.
The schemes may seem especially tempting in a world where people do make money for microtasks like labeling AI training data and some victims told the FTC that they actually received payouts at the beginning of the schemes, leading them to think they’d found a legitimate job. To avoid falling victim to task scams, the FTC recommends that you ignore unexpected text or WhatsApp messages about job opportunities, especially offers to pay you in exchange for liking things online. Consumers should also never pay anyone as a prerequisite to getting paid themselves in exchange for work.
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