Practise judging real job ads and messages against your checklist.
Collect five part-time, remote or freelance job ads or messages, and keep a screenshot of each one. You'll screen all five against your own checklist and finish with a written verdict on every ad.
Open a jobs group on Facebook or Telegram and you'll see dozens of part-time offers within a few minutes. They range from cafes wanting weekend staff, to tuition agencies, to ads offering something like S$200 a day for liking videos (an illustrative figure, not a specific ad). They're hard to tell apart in your head because every one is written to sound appealing and every one pushes you to reply quickly, so you need to write your answers down and check each ad against the same questions.
Screenshots are the easiest way to keep the ads. Look in job portals, social media groups and posts shared in your community chats, and use any job messages you've received without asking for them on WhatsApp, Telegram or SMS.
Aim for a mix. If all five are obvious scams, the exercise teaches you little. Include at least one ad that looks like a normal job from a known employer, and at least one you're genuinely unsure about.
Don't reply to any of the messages while you do this. You can study an offer without contacting the sender, and a reply tells a scammer that your number is live.
A screening sheet is a table that marks each ad as likely real, likely scam or unclear, with your reasons written down. Make one with five rows, one per ad. Give it these columns: where you found the ad, the company named, your answer to each checklist question, what you found when you looked up the company, your verdict and your reasons.
Put your checklist questions across the top. Use the five you wrote after lesson 3.2, "Red flags in a job offer that is too easy". If you're not happy with your list, make sure it at least covers the main signals from that lesson:
whether you would 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 whether the recruiter will speak or meet properly
Read the ad once, quickly, the way you normally would. Note your gut reaction in a word or two before you analyse anything, so you can compare it with your final verdict later.
Next, answer each checklist question using only what the ad itself says. Where the ad gives no answer, write "not stated". If you end up with many not-stated answers, the ad is vague, and you can record that vagueness as a finding about the ad.
Then look up the company. Search for the name yourself to find its official website, rather than using any link in the ad. Check whether the job appears on the company's own careers page. Search ACRA business records through the Bizfile service to see whether a business of that name is registered and active. Compare the contact details in the ad with the official ones.
Last, give a verdict of likely real, likely scam or unclear, with one or two sentences of reasons. Unclear is a valid verdict and means you need to check further before replying, for example by contacting the company through its official website. The gap between your gut reaction and your final verdict is often the most useful thing you learn from the exercise.
Take an SMS from an unknown local mobile number. It says it is hiring part-time online assistants for a "well-known e-commerce company". It pays S$100 to S$500 daily for 30 minutes a day on your phone, and you need no experience. You apply by adding "our HR" on WhatsApp, and the message ends with "Limited slots".
The gut reaction is "too good to be true". On the checklist, pay to start is not stated, and in an ad like this that means the payment request will come later, if it comes at all. The offer reached you as an unsolicited SMS from a number you've never contacted. The pay isn't realistic, because up to S$500 for 30 minutes is far above any real part-time rate. You can't identify a real company or person, since the company is unnamed and "our HR" has no name. Whether the recruiter will meet you is not stated, and the only contact offered is WhatsApp.
The company check has nothing to work with. With no name, there is nothing to search on ACRA or any careers page, and that gap is a strong signal in itself. The verdict is likely scam. The reasons are unsolicited contact, unrealistic pay, no named company or recruiter, a push to a messaging app as the only contact, and "limited slots", which is the scarcity lever covered in module 1.
Compare that with a Tiong Bahru cafe (also an invented example) that posts on its own social media page that it is hiring weekend baristas. The hourly rate is in line with similar jobs, and the post gives a phone number and an address. An ACRA search shows the business is registered and active. The verdict is likely real, because the pay is ordinary, the employer is identifiable, nobody is asking you for money and the ad sits on the business's own page.
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.
Fill in the job ad screening sheet for five ads, then write down the strongest scam signal you found.
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