You’re probably being scammed but haven’t realised it yet. Here’s what to look out for

If you haven’t watched my investigative feature video yet, I went “undercover” as a different person (sort of) to talk to several TikTok job iMessage scammers via WhatsApp. And the results were absolutely unexpected, but I now have evidence of what scammers say to you to try and get you to give them money.

It’s not to say that they’re all going to be exactly like what I’m going to list. There are many different types of scams—from job scams like what I investigated, to scams that start on Facebook pages, to super elaborate love scams like on Netflix’s Tinder Swindler.

However, with the way that they talked to me—and how they tried to entice me to give them money—we can hopefully make the connections and stay vigilant. And since scams can take a few days, weeks, and even years, you might be in the middle of a scam without even knowing it, here are the signs you can look out for.

You’ve received messages offering you too-good-to-be-true offers… out of nowhere

The above messages are actual iMessages I’ve received, and I’ve gotten so many of them every day at one point. And reporting them as junk never helped, either, because these messages come from different Apple ID accounts. They also all have some sort of enticing offer to get you to WhatsApp them instead of through iMessage.

The most common one I’ve seen other Apple users complain about is the TikTok job scam iMessage, and it’s the scam message that I personally get a ton of as well. But the iMessages also vary, with some saying that they’re from human resources of a legit-sounding company, to some who don’t have any backstory at all.

Even though they have different backstories, they all essentially have the same format and formula. They’d first introduce who they are, and then they’d offer a suspiciously easy way to make money—with a “promised” amount of money you would make with them. After that, they’d ask you to text them on WhatsApp, not through the same iMessage thread.

In SoyaCincau BM Fatin’s video where she interviewed a victim of a scam, he lost more than RM18,000 after falling for a maid service scam on a Facebook page. Looking into some cleaning service pages on Facebook, I can still see those pages live on the platform.

It’s admittedly pretty difficult to tell if you’re initiating something with a scammer, especially if you don’t know what to look out for. So the way that we can tell if a Facebook page is less trustworthy is if it has been established or made pretty recently. The images are also usually pretty generic, and their posts seem to entice you with offers that are too good to be true—like a cleaning service half the price of the other more legitimate places. Additionally, you can check for reviews of the service. One of the pages I saw has many users warning others that the page is a scam page.

They type super fast, almost like they copied the words from a script

In my experience contacting the scammers back through WhatsApp (which I do not recommend, by the way!), it took them a few minutes to respond to my text. And they seem to be able to send me long and vaguely official-sounding paragraphs in just a few seconds. Granted, one of them misspelled the word ‘TikTok’ (probably deliberately), but if your eyes aren’t that sharp the texts might seem official enough.

They’ll also bombard you with information about them, and what they can offer you. Their offers can even be very different from what was promised in the iMessages. And if you seem to have sent them off-script messages like “I don’t understand”, they’d reply to you in a style very different from the long paragraphs.

They’ll make you register your personal details in an “app” using a very suspicious link

After I agreed to the “easy job” they were offering, one of the scammers asked me to click on a very suspicious-looking link. The link brought me to a more suspicious website that masks itself as a registration portal. It asked me to fill in my personal details like a password and my telephone number. If an unsuspecting user filled in the page with their regular password—or something they’ve used before—the scammers could potentially have the information.

The scammer also asked me to screenshot my page after I’ve “registered”. After that, they asked which “job” I’d rather do to get started with. And the job in question is pretty much just investing money to get profit back—which isn’t at all what I was promised in the beginning. Wasn’t the job supposed to be just watching TikTok videos for money?

They’ll try to show you “proof”

My conversations with the scammers were a bit repetitive, and they didn’t seem to want to budge until you’d agreed to send them money. And when I questioned their authenticity, they sent me a Telegram link that’s meant to give you confidence that it’s legitimate. The Telegram group, which you can see in my video here, was filled with fake users saying that they’ve banked in money and have gotten paid.

But when I tried clicking the link back after a week, the link and Telegram group seemed to have “expired”. And it just seemed like the group has never existed.

I found that the conversations with the scammers weren’t leading me to anywhere new anymore, so I stopped replying and ended my experiment. Unless I paid them the RM20 they asked for, they weren’t going to give me anything new. But even days after, the scammers tried baiting me back with the same “job offer” messages.

What can we learn?

These signs above are mostly for one type of scammer. There are, of course, many different types, and they always seem to be one step ahead of us—even when we think we know what we’re doing.

There’s also a misconception that scams are just targeted to the naive. In fact, many “educated” individuals fall victim to large scams—like an engineer falling for a Tinder love scam, or a doctor allegedly falling for a phishing scam.

It’s all the more concerning considering news of data breaches—from citizens’ data and photos allegedly being sold online, to the Prime Minister’s Telegram account being hacked. We also reported of the “TNB Blackout compensation scam messages” which shows that it’s sent from 15454 and “MySejahtera compensation scam” which is sent from “GOV”.

The messages appear from the same message thread as legit messages, convincing users that the message is legit. Like in those two instances, the messages urge you to log in to your Touch ‘n Go wallet and they would provide a link that looks exactly the same as the legit login page.

As for the TikTok job scam iMessages, every Apple user I know has received these messages. It’s an irritating problem because we can’t seem to get away from them, either. When people do fall victim to a scam, there’s really nothing you can do to get your money back, either—besides make a police report.

Scams can be difficult to spot, especially the more effective ones. But make sure you remember to stay away from things like too-good-to-be-true offers, people you don’t know that ask you for money right away, and if they ask you for personal information like bank details, passwords, or access to your computer.

Remember to also do your fact-checking and research from reputable sources, do not click on any links even from the banks—always go to your browser and access the website by typing the URL yourself, or access it from the app. Scammers are getting very good at getting victims to hand over their username/passwords and OTPs—so keep vigilant.

This article might not have all the answers, but I hope this gives you a deeper understanding of how some scammers work and operate.

Related reading

• Johor senior citizen loses more than RM250,000 in online love scam
• Doctor loses RM13k from her CIMB Bank account at 2am, claims no OTP required
• I replied to a TikTok job iMessage scammer, and I had to make a police report