You will practise judging real job listings and messages against your checklist.
Scroll through a jobs group on Facebook or Telegram and you'll see dozens of part-time offers in a few minutes. Some are cafes looking for weekend staff. Some are tuition agencies. Some promise S$200 a day for liking videos. Telling them apart in your head is hard, because they're all written to sound appealing and they all ask you to reply quickly.
In this exercise you'll take five real job ads or messages and run each one through the checklist you wrote in lesson 3.2, Red flags in a job offer that is too easy. You'll end with a screening sheet that marks each ad as likely real, likely scam or unclear, with your reasons written down.
Gather five part-time, remote or freelance job ads or messages. Good places to look are job portals, social media groups, posts shared in community chats, and any unsolicited job messages you've received on WhatsApp, Telegram or SMS. Screenshots are the easiest way to keep them.
Try to get a mix. If all five are obvious scams, the exercise won't teach you much. Aim for at least one that looks like a normal job from a known employer, and at least one you genuinely aren't sure about.
Don't reply to any of the messages while you do this. You can study an offer without contacting the sender, and replying tells a scammer that your number is live.
Make a table with five rows, one per ad, and these columns: where you found it, the company named, your answers to each checklist question, what you found when you looked up the company, your verdict, and your reasons.
Your checklist questions go across the top. Use the five you wrote after lesson 3.2. If you're not happy with your list, make sure it covers the main signals from that lesson: whether you'd have to pay anything to start or keep working, how the offer reached you, whether the pay is realistic for the work, whether you can identify a real company and a real person, and whether the recruiter will speak or meet properly.
For each ad, go in this order.
Start by reading the ad once, quickly, as you normally would. Note your gut reaction in a word or two. You'll compare it with your final verdict later, and the gap between them is often the most useful thing you learn.
Next, answer each checklist question for the ad, using only what the ad itself says. Where the ad doesn't give the answer, write "not stated". Vague ads produce a lot of not-stated answers, and that's a finding too.
Then look the company up. Find its official website by searching for the name yourself, and check whether the job appears on the company's own careers page. Search ACRA's business records through the Bizfile service to see whether a business by that name is registered and active. Note what you found and whether the contact details in the ad match the official ones.
Finally, give your verdict. Mark the ad as likely real, likely scam or unclear, and write one or two sentences explaining why. Unclear is a perfectly good answer. It means you'd need to check further before replying, for example by contacting the company through its official website.
Here is an illustration of one row on the sheet. The ad is made up.
The ad, received by SMS from an unknown local mobile number: "Hi, we are hiring part-time online assistants for a well-known e-commerce company. Earn S$100 to S$500 daily, work 30 minutes a day from your phone. No experience needed. Add our HR on WhatsApp to apply. Limited slots."
Gut reaction: too good to be true.
Checklist answers. Pay to start: not stated in the ad, which means it'll come later if it comes at all. How it reached me: unsolicited SMS from a number I've never contacted. Realistic pay: no, up to S$500 for 30 minutes is far above any real part-time rate. Real company and person: no, the company isn't named and "our HR" has no name. Willing to meet: not stated, and the only contact offered is WhatsApp.
Company check: there's no company name to search, so there's nothing to look up on ACRA or on any careers page. That gap is itself a strong signal.
Verdict: likely scam. Reasons: unsolicited contact, unrealistic pay, no named company or recruiter, a push to a messaging app, and "limited slots" pulling the scarcity lever from module 1.
Now compare that with a different illustration. A cafe in Tiong Bahru posts on its own social media page that it's hiring weekend baristas at an hourly rate in line with similar jobs, with a phone number and an address. The ACRA search shows the cafe's business is registered and active. The pay is ordinary, the employer is identifiable, and nobody is asking for money. That ad would be marked likely real.
Look across the whole sheet. You'll probably notice that one or two signals did most of the work, showing up again and again in the ads you marked as scams. Some signals may never have come up at all.
That pattern tells you which question to ask first next time an offer arrives, when you won't have a sheet in front of you.
Complete the job ad screening sheet for five ads and write the strongest scam signal you found.
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