Check a job offer for the signals that tell a scam apart from real part-time work.
You're looking for something to do on weekends, and an extra S$400 a month (an example figure) would pay for a holiday in December. A Telegram message arrives offering flexible hours, work you can do on your phone, no experience needed, and S$80 to S$300 a day, and you're tempted.
Plenty of part-time work in Singapore is real, and some of it pays well, so there's no need to be suspicious of every job. What helps is a short set of signals for telling a scam apart from a real offer, checked before you share any personal details or money.
The clearest signal is money going the wrong way. A real employer pays you and doesn't ask you to pay it.
The rule covers more than an obvious "registration fee". It covers any request to put money in before you have earned anything, including:
a deposit to activate your account a top-up to reach better tasks a payment for training a fee for a uniform or a starter kit an instruction to buy equipment or products from the company and claim the money back later
The amount doesn't matter. A S$20 deposit is as much a red flag as a S$2,000 one (both invented figures), because either one shows the job is built on you sending money. Lesson 3.1, "How task scams pay you first to hook you", showed how task-scam top-ups grow over time. Go back to it if you want to see how deposit and top-up demands escalate.
Some real jobs do need you to have your own equipment, such as a phone or a bicycle for delivery work. You buy that equipment wherever you like, and nobody asks you to send money to the employer or to an account they choose.
Real employers mostly advertise on job portals, on their own websites or through recruitment agencies, and you usually apply to them. Scams often arrive the other way round. You get an unsolicited message on WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or social media from someone you have never contacted, who says they found your profile or got your number from a database.
These messages tend to sound alike. They offer high pay for very little work and flexible hours, and they say you need no skills, no interview and no experience. The job is often described vaguely, for example "online assistant" or "product promotion", with no clear explanation of what the company sells or why it needs you.
An unsolicited message isn't proof of a scam by itself, because recruiters do contact people. Stop and check when the offer is unsolicited and the pay is also far too high for the work.
Scam offers are usually vague about the company and about the person you're talking to. You might see a company name with no address, or the name of a well-known firm with a contact using a personal messaging account. The recruiter might give only a first name and a profile photo.
A real recruiter can tell you which company is hiring, where it's based and what the job involves. They will usually speak to you on a call, meet in person or arrange a video interview. A recruiter who will only chat by text, refuses to show their face and keeps steering the conversation back to money is behaving like a scammer.
It's also a warning sign if they ask early for your NRIC number, bank login or Singpass details, before any real interview has taken place. Payroll will need your bank account number eventually, but never your password or a one-time password.
Before you share any personal details, look the company up using sources the recruiter didn't give you. Scammers often borrow the names of real, well-known companies, and the real company is usually happy to confirm that it doesn't hire through Telegram.
Start by typing the company's name into a search engine yourself to find its official website. Don't use links or contact details from the recruiter. Then check whether the job appears on the company's careers page. Next, contact the company using the details on its official site and ask whether the recruiter works for them.
You can also check whether the business is registered. ACRA is the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, which registers businesses in Singapore. You can search its records through its Bizfile service to see whether a business is registered and still active. Be more cautious if a company doesn't appear in ACRA's records at all, or was registered very recently and has no other history. A registration doesn't prove the job is real, though, because scammers can use a real company's name.
Aisyah got a WhatsApp message offering S$150 a day to review hotels for a travel company. She searched for the company herself and found a real website, but the site listed no job openings. She emailed the address on the company's website. The company replied that it doesn't recruit through WhatsApp and has had reports of scammers using its name. The whole check took fifteen minutes, and she had shared nothing before she did it.
Signals are easy to forget when you really want the job. A short list of questions that you ask every time works better, because it doesn't rely on you remembering anything in the moment. Each question should be one you can answer yes or no, using the four groups of signals above: money in, how it reached you, who's behind it, and what your own checks found.
Write a five-question checklist to run on any unexpected job offer before you reply.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).