It's Easy to be Fooled
A woman was recently interviewed (online) for a position by a company she thought well of. As part of the evaluation process, she was told to complete a "take-home challenge," which was to create a new app experience for a "hypothetical new product." As the details were described, the assignment got longer and longer. It would have ended up taking a week to complete. She finally realized that the request was deceitful; the company would have used her work for its own benefit, without paying her.
Scamming Happens a Lot
She posted this experience online and got multiple responses from people who had been led on in a similar way by various companies. I don't know whether any of these people followed through fully with the assignment, but they all went partially through the process, which was a waste of their time and an exploitation of their hopes for a job.
It Happened to Me
In fact, I was almost trapped in a different scam. I received an email from my brother, asking if he could borrow some money. I asked why and he gave a plausible answer. Caught up in his situation, I initially disregarded the specifics of how he wanted the money sent and began the process of getting it to him. But along the way, I realized that somehow this didn't make sense. I ended up saving myself from a scammer who had used my brother's email address to ask me to send "him" that money.
Scams Have Become More Sophisticated
Scammers have now achieved, through AI voice cloning technology, the ability to impersonate relatives and friends with just a few-second sample of their voices. A woman received a call from her daughter, who sounded terrified, and a man who was with the daughter demanded a ransom of one million dollars. The woman had co-workers call 911, and the dispatcher recognized the scam. The daughter was, in fact, just fine. Any of us can have our voices copied quite easily. A scammer may call, and if you just say "Hello," that can give them all the material they need.
Precautions to Take
The examples of scams that I've given here are increasingly cunning and take ever more vigilance to identify. The exploitation of the job seeker became apparent as the application process became more unrealistic. My intuition informed me that there was something strange about my "brother's" request. As for the voice cloning, we are told to call back a "distressed relative" to see whether that is the case, or even to have a shared code word among relatives.
The Inner Guide
Better yet, an Inner Guide, with its exquisite sense of its surroundings due to its access to all of our subliminal perceptions, can sense and alert us when things seem "off." If you don't yet have an Inner Guide, you can acquire it here: https://emotionalcomfort.com/blog/post/you-can-acquire-an-inner-guide-part-4
