How to tell if a job posting is legitimate: warning signs
A job ad on Indeed or LinkedIn carrying a recognizable company name is not proof the role is real or still open. Scammers take outdated ads from legitimate employers, change small details, and repost them on the same major job boards jobseekers already trust, the FTC reports.
Knowing how to tell if a job posting is legitimate matters more than it did a few years ago. Reports of job and employment-agency scams to the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network database nearly tripled between 2020 and 2024, and reported losses climbed from $90 million to $501 million over that period, FTC data shows.
The guidance below applies to anyone applying through job boards, social media, or an unsolicited recruiter message, including students, career changers, and remote-job seekers. The FTC has also published scam-specific guidance for military spouses. Not every suspicious listing is fraud, though. A Congressional Research Service brief on "ghost" job postings describes a separate, harder-to-measure problem: ads for roles that don't currently exist or aren't being actively filled, with no official data tracking how common they are.
How to verify a job posting before applying
The FTC's central recommendation for confirming a listing is real, no matter where it turned up, is to locate the employer's own website and look for its "career opportunities" or "jobs" page rather than trusting the version posted on a third-party board, per the FTC. Finding a matching posting there is a practical way to check if a job listing is real before sharing any information. It confirms only that the employer published a matching listing, not that the role is still open or that the contact who reached out is genuine.
The FTC's guidance gets more specific when a recruiter reaches out first. It advises against relying on an unsolicited "recruiter" message on sites like Indeed or LinkedIn, telling applicants instead to find the active listing on the company's own encrypted site and apply there directly, the agency advises. Hijacked ads, the FTC says, may route applicants toward fake application portals or staged virtual interviews used to collect personal information.
A matching title, location, and description on the employer's own site gives the posting an independent, employer-hosted reference point. It doesn't confirm the role remains open or actively staffed, a gap some ghost postings exploit, as explained below.
Signs of a fake job posting
Some warning signs point to fraud no matter how polished the rest of a listing looks. A legitimate employer, including the federal government, will never ask an applicant to pay for a job. Anyone who does is a scammer, the FTC states.
A related pattern involves checks. If an "employer" sends a check, often described as covering equipment or supplies, and then asks for part of the money back, that's a fake-check scam, not a signing bonus. The FTC's advice is blunt: never deposit a check from someone unknown, the FTC warns.
Hijacked listings also tend to ask for sensitive details early. Scammers posing as employers sometimes request a Social Security number and bank account information, framing it as necessary to set up direct-deposit payroll, the FTC has found. A request like that before any formal offer is a reason to pause.
A quick search can surface other applicants' experiences before anyone shares more information. The FTC recommends searching the company name or hiring contact's name alongside "scam," "fraud," "review," or "complaint." Finding reports from people who lost money is reason enough to walk away, the agency advises. Glowing reviews aren't automatically reassuring either; the FTC notes that positive reviews and success stories tied to a job offer can be fabricated, the FTC notes.
A payment request, a check-and-return arrangement, or an early ask for a Social Security or bank account number is reason enough to stop and report the listing at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
Regulators have started building a more formal response to this pattern. Early last year, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson directed the agency to form a Joint Labor Task Force tasked with addressing deceptive job advertising, including misrepresented pay and benefits, according to a Congressional Research Service review.
When the employer is real but the job may not be
Not every disappointing application traces back to fraud. The same CRS review describes ghost job postings as ads from a real, or seemingly real, employer for a position that doesn't currently exist or isn't being actively filled, a different problem from impersonation.
The federal government's own method for counting job openings shows how high that bar can be. Under the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a position counts as an opening only if a specific role exists with available work, the job could start within 30 days, and the employer is actively recruiting outside candidates, CRS explains. That's a standard built for national labor statistics, not a checklist an applicant can run against a single posting.
How common ghost postings actually are is unclear. No official statistics currently measure their prevalence, so a listing that looks stale shouldn't automatically be written off as fake. A posting that's been live a while, or that draws no response after a reasonable follow-up, may reflect a slow internal hiring process rather than a role that was never real.
Lawmakers in a handful of states have started treating this as a disclosure problem rather than a fraud problem, though none of the following were enacted law as of the CRS review:
- New Jersey: identical bills introduced in mid-2024 would require employers to disclose whether a posting reflects an existing vacancy, provide a hiring timeline, and remove filled postings within two weeks. Both had cleared committee with amendments at the time of the review.
- Kentucky: a bill introduced in early 2025 would prohibit ghost job postings outright and require vacancy disclosure, backed by civil penalties.
- California: a bill introduced in early 2025 would require a clear statement disclosing whether a posting reflects an actual vacancy, enforceable by the state labor commissioner as unfair competition. A legislative committee had passed it with amendments at the time of the review.
Any of these bills could have advanced, stalled, or become law since that snapshot was taken. Applicants who want current status should check with the relevant state legislature rather than assume the status described above still holds.
Outside the United States, the same review noted that Ontario had already enacted legislation requiring most employers to disclose whether a posting reflects an existing vacancy and to give interviewed applicants follow-up information on a role's status, with the rules taking effect in 2026. On the federal side, no bill specifically addressing ghost postings had been introduced in Congress as of the review, though deceptive job ads may fall under Section 5 of the FTC Act's ban on unfair or deceptive practices.
For jobseekers, the three checks reinforce each other rather than stand alone. Pause if a posting has no matching listing on the employer's own site, or if a contact requests payment or banking information. A verified listing that's simply slow to respond is a different situation; the available data doesn't support treating a quiet employer as a scammer. Prioritizing applications with clearer signs of active hiring remains reasonable, without assuming bad faith on the employer's side.
What to do next
Learning how to avoid job scams starts with the same checks regulators point to: compare a posting against the employer's own career page, treat payment requests and premature financial information as the clearest scam indicators, and recognize that a stale-but-verified listing reflects a measurement gap in ghost-job data rather than confirmed fraud.
None of these checks guarantees a posting is being actively filled. Together, though, they help flag the postings carrying real warning signs before more time or personal information goes into an application.
