I answered a WhatsApp spam call—and what happened next shocked me.
Ever gotten one of those creepy robo calls saying, “Hey, add us on WhatsApp—we’ve got a job for you!”? You’re supposed to just hang up, right? But what if curiosity gets the best of you and you decide to dive headfirst into the rabbit hole of scam calls? Well, that’s exactly what a daring TikToker named thenightnetwork did—he played along to see what this “job opportunity” scam is really about. Spoiler alert: it’s not about part-time work packing boxes; it’s about creating fake Google reviews, aka the world’s sneakier version of a click farm. In a world where scammers harness AI and encrypted chat apps to mask their shenanigans, sometimes the best answer is just to hang up and run—or in this case, block. Curious how deep the scam goes? You might be shocked what a simple “job offer” text can really mean…
A TikToker decided to actually follow through on a common scam to see for himself what kind of scam it is.
Over the last few months you may have received a phone call or a voice message where a robotic voice asks you to add their WhatsApp as they have a ‘job opportunity’ for you.
Of course, the sensible thing to do if you receive an unsolicited call like this is to simply hang up and not take thing any further. You don’t know what they might be doing, and particularly if you are sent a link then it’s important to not click it as you don’t know whether it could install malware on your device.
There’s also a good reason that such criminals use WhatsApp as well, as WhatsApp is an encrypted messaging service, which can make it more difficult to trace what the scammers are doing.
But while the sensible thing to do is to simply hang up, ignore the messages, and block the number, many people may have a weird curiosity about these calls, after all you know it’s a scam, but what kind of scam is it?
TikToker thenightnetwork decided to take things into his own hands, and actually followed up on one of these scams to see for himself what is going on, before sharing it in a video which has had over 700,000 views on social media.
The best thing to do is to just hang up the phone (Getty Stock)
The TikToker suggested that the reason people may notice an increase in the number of scam calls that are coming through at the moment is because of data breaches.
This means that the personal information of huge numbers of people is used to target them with these sorts of scams.
While the scams may seem relatively easy to spot, scammers will send out automated messages in such volumes that even if one in a thousand people goes forward to the next step, it’s still worth it.
In this case, the TikToker revealed that after he added the number on WhatsApp he started to chat with a bot in the conversation, with generative AI also making it easier for scammers to make their schemes appear more convincing.
The scammers had made an offer of part-time work where they would pay a set amount for people to pack things up into packages at home and post it off for a daily fee, which he explained was a bait and switch tactic.
When he followed through on the conversation, he was instead asked to leave a Google review for a hospitality business for a small fee of £7, which needless to say never materialised.
The TikToker explained that this is a ‘click farm’ (Getty Stock)
The TikToker explained: “It was at that point I realised that this is a click farm.”
A click farm, as the name suggests, is a way for companies boost engagement with their business, in this case by posting fake reviews.
A business can’t just write the review themselves, because Google will spot that the reviews have come from the same IP address and flag it.
This way the reviews are ‘real’ in the sense that they have been written by real people from their own device, but of course they’re not real reviews because those people have never actually gone to the business.
Needless to say, if you are looking for a job and get this call then hang up the phone immediately – actual recruiters will not contact you this way, and while this video uncovered one element of the scam, there could still be variations out there as well, so the best way to be safe is to just hang up.
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