On a warm summer day at the beginning of July, my alarm clock went off (and by alarm clock, I mean my phone alarm), and I woke up to a Slack message I had been laid off. This is the third time in 3 years this would happen to me.
However, I had felt it coming. A shift had been happening at my startup for a couple of months. I had been put on new assignments, and while I actually enjoyed the work, it didn’t feel right. So it didn’t come as a shock when I found out I and others on my team had been part of the layoff. I immediately threw myself back into job applications and filed for unemployment. It wasn’t my first rodeo – but I still wasn’t expecting to be scammed.
Post Layoff Woes
Unemployment was a bust (thanks for that, GDOL) because they didn’t process my application correctly. I had applied the year before when I had been laid off, and my application, to my knowledge, was processed twice. My account has been locked. I have gone into the career center and talked to someone, but no one has unlocked it. As I write this today, my account is still locked in November, and I never received unemployment. I did get food stamps, though, so we take our wins where we can get them.
I decided to make a spreadsheet for my job search this time around. Inside the Gsheet, I made columns for types of jobs, the status of my application, whether I had followed up, etc. Once I hit 500 job applications, I stopped using the sheet as much, mainly because it depressed me to look at it. However, these spreadsheets are a great way to keep track of your progress. A few of those applications that I had out were for Paramount+ and various of their umbrella companies.
When I received an interview request from Paramount, I didn’t think twice about it. As far as I could tell, it was legitimate, and it mirrored emails I had gotten from Sports Illustrated and PEOPLE magazine.
An Offer
I quickly accepted the request, and they said I would do an editing test to streamline their process. Again, this is normal for editorial job applications, so I agreed. A few days later, when I had set aside time to complete the test, I opened my email and looked more closely at the test. The emails were not from Paramount but from a recruiting services email. This was proof enough for me, and I spent a good bit of time trying to perform my best on the editing test. Once I finished it, I sent it in and felt good about myself.
The next day, I was having coffee with a friend and checked my email to see I had a JOB OFFER. This seemed odd to me, as I had never interviewed with an actual person; I only turned in my test. Was my writing really that good? I remember a smile growing across my face as I messaged my boyfriend to tell him the news. Something inside me kept saying it wasn’t right, but I let myself feel joy in the moment. Later, when I got home, I checked my spreadsheet to see where the Paramount role was. As you can probably assume, I did not find it. That was the first sign I had been scammed.
Next, I decided to embrace my random knowledge from years of watching MTV’s Catfish the TV Show and look into the email addresses. The emails I got from “Paramount” were linked to a fake website, as if they had just purchased the domain. Their emails were coming up entirely AI-generated, so they looked accurate – they were imitating the actual job interview process.
Lastly, I Googled the names of the people in the emails and discovered a now-deleted Reddit thread with tons of people saying they were also scammed. I didn’t stop there – I reached out to a friend who is a freelancer for Paramount, and she gave me an email for the recruitment team for new talent. After about a week, I reached out to them, and they confirmed that it was a scam and that I should no longer have further contact with them.
Protect Yourself
This experience was absolutely heartbreaking but not shocking. I was emotionally sad because I had been so excited to start a new job and put effort into the editing test. I am struggling financially, and that would’ve been an enormous relief. As I said before, this wasn’t my first round of job searching recently in my career, and I am pretty apt at spotting scam jobs when I see them. They are getting more and more convincing and targeting job seekers by imitating the exact emails you would receive from big-name companies like Paramount. Luckily, my intuition went off before I moved forward and gave out too much personal information. I’m grateful for that.
Being scammed is stressful at least and incredibly harmful at worst. Protect yourself.
Here is a resource for the Federal Trade Commission talking about job scams.
