I made money with a dubious WhatsApp job offer

Sunday afternoon, around 2:30 PM: A message appears on my cell phone from an unknown number offering me a ‘flexible role’. Once more. This is the third message I’ve received in a few days. And I’m not the only one. Several people in my circle of acquaintances have had the same experience, and it has not gone unnoticed by the police: last week the cantonal police of Bern called for caution against such “fraudulent job offers”.

Of course this smells like a scam, but it’s one message too many: I’m curious and decide to answer. The person I’m talking to says her name is Grace, she writes to me (in French) with an American or Canadian number (starting with +1) and claims she is a “recruiter at Approach People Recruitment Switzerland”.

People Recruitment approach exists. It is a recruitment company that, according to the website, actually has a presence in Switzerland. However, over the phone, the company assured me that they had nothing to do with the message in question:

“This is a scam,” an employee told me. I already suspected it, but this confirmed it.

«Hello 🥰»

As soon as I express my interest, Grace switches to English. “We are currently recruiting for different companies for different roles and positions in different locations in Switzerland,” she explains evasively. Applicants must be able to “communicate in English” (yes, they spelled “English”), be 20 years or older, and be “Swiss citizens.” The salary is “determined on a day-to-day basis” and must be “received through a local bank”. Almost all of this information will turn out to be false.

After I give her positive feedback, Grace tells me that “HR” will contact me. This happens half an hour later via WhatsApp. The second person introduces themselves with a female first name, but this time the message comes from a British number (+44). “Hello 🥰,” she writes to me in English. And further:

She offers to explain the details of the “job” to me, which she does with lots of “sir,” “dear,” and emojis (🥰 and 😊 are her favorites). She is extremely responsive and responds to my messages immediately. My agent, as she will call herself, writes that “remote jobs” have become popular after the pandemic and “can be done anytime, anywhere.” She explains the details to me in somewhat hesitant English:

It’s still a bit vague, but I’ll soon learn that the “job” is to review job applications, through a website called AppMart. A Google search for this term yields no results.

There was also no information from the police: “The term ‘Appmart’ does not tell us anything concrete,” confirmed the spokesperson for the Valais cantonal police, Gaëtan Lathion. It sounds similar to its colleagues in the cantons of Vaud and Fribourg:

Almost 2000 francs

However, the payment my agent is talking about sounds very tempting: “This work only takes about an hour a day and you can cash out your winnings,” she says. The salary depends on the number of consecutive days I do my work. More specific:

That’s about 431, 986 and 1879 francs for a few hours of work. “Is that something for you?” she asks me after this explanation.

“Yes.”

She then sends me a link that supposedly takes me to the AppMart platform and asks me to notify her once I register. And then the first surprise. The site is real and has a pretty decent interface. At that point I still thought it was a front, a pretext to get my bank details and steal money from me. It’s starting to look like something more complicated.

The WhatsApp group

The second surprise: before my agent explains to me how AppMart works, she invites me to join a WhatsApp group.

The members of the group are their other “customers”. There are about 20 people, and unlike the people I’ve come into contact with so far, They give the impression that they are ‘real people’. They exchange tips about ‘work’, offer help, motivate each other and share photos of their meals or their dogs.

Most of all, these people talk about money. The money they made from AppMart. Screenshots show the amounts paid to you after a work period. So everything indicates that they are actually paid. Some of them also confirmed this to me when I contacted them privately and asked if they had ever been paid.

Angry Birds

I will receive proof of this shortly. My agent also explains to me via WhatsApp how AppMart works. It’s very simple: one pop-up window after another appears on the website. Each popup shows an app’s name and logo, as well as a rating. My job is to leave a five star review every time.

In most cases these are video games for smartphones, but there are also other apps, such as calendars. With a few exceptions, they are not really known.

A work cycle consists of three rounds of 35 reviews each. I just do one to get trained. Then, to my surprise, my agent announces that she will explain to me how to withdraw the money. After a few minutes of work, I get paid. 29 pounds, to be precise, that’s 32 francs.

This is done via the app Wise, an international money transfer company. To receive the money, I first have to write a message to someone else, also via WhatsApp. My “agent” gave me the number and a few minutes later the £29 was in my Wise account, transferred by a person with a Russian-sounding name.

Thousands of francs lost

Something isn’t right. A person pretending to be someone else offers me a job via WhatsApp, which is presented in an extremely strange way. But this job exists and you can get money for it. Where is the fraud?

It may be that these rewards are just a lure for people just starting out. I ended up ending my experiment early, so I can’t rule out problems arising later. News that reached us after this article was published seems to confirm this assumption.

The people who contacted us all tell a similar story: they have received messages via WhatsApp or Telegram offering them an easy and well-paying job. However, all this only serves to ‘build trust’, they say. Only after this first step does fraud take place. In all kinds of ways, victims are lured into depositing money that they will never get back. The losses amount to hundreds or even thousands of francs.

What must we do?

One thing is certain: “Caution is always advised when offers clearly come out of nowhere or seem too tempting,” reports the Valais police spokesperson. “No serious job offer is based solely on contact via social networks or instant messaging,” confirms his colleague from Freiburg, Martial Pugin.

What should you do if you receive such a message? “The best advice you can give is not to accept a job from someone you don’t know or who you only know online,” answers Florence Frei, communications officer for the Vaud cantonal police.

The Freiburg police, in turn, advises “never agree to a money transfer or sharing personal data, end the conversation quickly and block contact.”