Taking advantage of the chaos created by Covid-19, scammers have bilked billions of dollars from Americans looking for a job during the pandemic.

That's according to a new study from the Better Business Bureau, which indicates job scam reports filed with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre were up 27% between 2018 and 2020.

That percentage has likely grown higher over the past six months, said Stephanie Garland, the BBB regional director covering Southwest Missouri.

"We were expecting an increase in (some specific job scams), and we saw that," she said. "I don't know if anybody could have predicted everything else that's been going on."

These high-tech scams are now targeting Southwest Missouri residents, with reports filed by people living in Joplin, Carthage and Neosho, as well as smaller communities such as Granby, Liberal and Washburn.

"This goes to show that this isn't seen in just big cities" like New York City, Chicago or St. Louis, Garland said. "This is a pretty big deal."

Job scams aren't new. They thrived long before the Internet, commonly popping up inside newspaper classified ad sections or in the backs of magazines. But a new generation of scammers now advertises legitimate-sounding jobs across the web and on social media outlets, or reaches out to men and women who have posted their resumes on legitimate job boards such as Indeed, LinkedIn or ZipRecruiter.

The pandemic and the subsequent national lockdown wreaked havoc on people's livelihoods, forcing millions to work from home and millions more to lose or quit their jobs. Scammers immediately pounced on this unexpected but profitable opportunity, Garland said.

The most common scams reported to BBB involve identity theft, reshipping schemes and payments using fake checks.

"During the pandemic, a growing number of reports described how people lost money... with many of these people actually believing they'd been hired by a legitimate company," Garland said, "but they ended up unwittingly helping the scammers."

Many of the scams prey on people's wishes to work from home - made easier by the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. Due to the tech-savvy nature of these scams, it's the millennial generation primarily targeted by such scams, with 25- to 34-year-olds losing, on average, US$1,000 per scam. and 54% of those scammed were unemployed, according to the report, and 50% were searching for full-time jobs.

"They are preying on people's hopes and dreams," Garland said. "That's how I interpret it. Here are people hoping for a better future or a better life and what happens instead is they fall victim to a scam."

To make the fraud as realistic as possible to their potential millennial victims, scammers conduct interviews via email, text or by phone call, she said. Fake contracts are filled out and signed for a bogus company's human resources department. Zoom meetings are held, though the employer will be partially hidden in shadow or say their web cam has unexpectedly broken. Victims may even receive false company job titles, such as "personal assistant to data entry," for example, or "distribution agent."

All of these examples, which would never happen in a legitimate business hiring situation, "are red flags," Garland said. Should they happen, "you should get off there immediately."

Scammers, she said, "have a lot of gumption, and this is how they get to where they can get the chance to scam you. People might think nobody would ever think about (faking a company and job interview), but unfortunately they can and do."

Since 2018, 14 million Americans have fallen victim to such scams, resulting in US$2bil in personal losses, she said.

"What's concerning for BBB is that a lot of people who are falling for this, they are looking for a great, legitimate job, and they're falling for something and spending money during a time they potentially can't afford," Garland said. "It's heartbreaking."

 - TNS