Are Jobs on Indeed Legit? What the FTC Data Actually Shows

Are Jobs on Indeed Legit? What the FTC Data Actually Shows

Indeed is a real company running a real job board, and most listings on it lead to real employers. That is the straightforward part of the answer.

The complicated part is what federal data shows about everything else happening on hiring platforms right now.

Reported losses to job scams rose from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission, with the number of reports roughly tripling over the same period. The trend did not slow after that. In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, the FTC logged about 25,000 job scam reports totalling $150.4 million in losses, with a median loss of $2,000 per victim.

Those figures almost certainly understate the problem. The FTC estimates that fewer than one in ten fraud victims report to a federal agency at all.

So the useful question is not whether Indeed is legitimate. It is how to tell a real listing from the growing number that are not, and the answer turns out to be more concrete than most advice suggests.

What the federal data actually shows

The scale is worth setting out precisely, because the numbers have been climbing every single year.

FTC reported losses by year: $90 million in 2020, $131 million in 2021, $179 million in 2022, $286 million in 2023, and $501 million in 2024. That is a more than fivefold increase across four years.

The Better Business Bureau tracked the same escalation independently. Its May 2026 employment scams study recorded 23,234 reports through BBB Scam Tracker in a single year, roughly double the year before.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $362.9 million in employment fraud losses for 2025 in its annual report, using a different methodology and a different reporting population.

Three separate federal and non-profit bodies measuring different samples all show the same direction. This is not a media narrative. It is a documented shift in criminal activity toward job seekers.

So is Indeed itself legitimate?

Yes. Indeed is a subsidiary of Recruit Holdings, a publicly traded Japanese company, and it operates as one of the largest job aggregators in the world. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Both are real businesses with real revenue from real employers.

The issue is structural rather than a question of the companies' honesty. Aggregators work by pulling in listings at enormous volume, often automatically from other sites and applicant tracking systems. Volume is the product. That same volume makes manual verification of every posting impossible.

Scammers understand this. A fraudulent listing on a trusted platform borrows that platform's credibility, which is exactly why they post there rather than building their own site.

The same logic applies to LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Handshake and every other major board. A listing appearing on a well-known platform tells you very little about the listing itself.

Job scams and ghost jobs are not the same problem

This distinction matters because the two get blurred constantly, and they call for completely different responses.

A job scam is a crime. Someone wants your money, your identity documents, or your bank details. There is no job and there was never a company.

A ghost job is a real company's posting for a role nobody intends to fill. No crime, no financial loss, just wasted time. Greenhouse data reported by the Wall Street Journal found 19 percent of jobs advertised in the second quarter of 2026 showed no meaningful hiring activity after applications arrived.

Ghost jobs cost you effort. Scams cost you money. When you apply and hear nothing, the overwhelmingly likely explanation is a ghost job or ordinary rejection volume, not fraud. Fraud announces itself later, at the point someone asks you for something.

Knowing which you are dealing with tells you where to spend your attention. Ghost jobs call for better verification before applying. Scams call for a hard rule about what you will never do after applying.

The scam type growing fastest

Task scams barely existed five years ago and now dominate the category.

FTC reports of task scams went from essentially zero in 2020 to around 5,000 in 2023, then quadrupled to roughly 20,000 in the first half of 2024 alone. The agency estimated task scams accounted for nearly 40 percent of all job scam reports that year.

The mechanism exploits sunk cost rather than greed. You are offered simple repetitive online work, often described as rating products, boosting app listings or completing sets of tasks. Early small payments arrive as promised. Then you are told you must deposit your own money to unlock a higher earning tier or to withdraw what you have supposedly accumulated.

The BBB found the median task scam loss reached about $2,300 in 2025, noticeably higher than the overall job scam median, because victims who have already invested time and received small real payments find it psychologically harder to walk away.

Cryptocurrency is the preferred payment method. Crypto losses to job scams reached $41 million in the first half of 2024, nearly double the total reported for all of 2023.

The FTC states the rule plainly: no honest company will pay you to rate or like things online, because that practice is itself illegal.

Where these scams now begin

The entry point has shifted, and this is the most practically useful finding in the recent data.

An FTC data spotlight published in April 2026 found that about one in three people who reported losing money to a job or business-opportunity scam in 2025 said it started on social media.

Not on a job board. On Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or a text message.

The pattern is consistent: an unexpected message about remote work with few specifics, a friendly recruiter persona, and a conversation that moves quickly to WhatsApp or Telegram where there is no platform moderation and no record.

The FTC's guidance on this is unambiguous. Real employers do not recruit strangers through unsolicited texts or WhatsApp messages. If first contact arrives that way, the probability of fraud is high regardless of how professional the follow-up looks.

The four requests that are always a scam

Most scam advice produces long checklists that are hard to remember under pressure. These four are worth committing to memory instead, because each one is disqualifying on its own.

Any request for payment. Training fees, equipment costs, background check fees, software licences, starter kits. Legitimate employers absorb these costs. Equipment scams in particular have grown, where a remote job offer arrives and you are asked to buy a laptop from a specified supplier with promised reimbursement that never comes.

A cheque you must deposit and partially forward. The cheque clears initially, then bounces days later. Your bank reclaims the full amount and you have already sent real money to the scammer.

Bank details or a Social Security number before a signed offer. Payroll information is collected after hire, through a verified HR system, never during screening.

Pressure to move fast or to a private channel. Urgency is a control tactic. Real hiring processes have documented steps and nobody loses a genuine offer by taking a day to verify it.

The FTC summarises the core of this in one line worth remembering: never pay anyone to get paid. Anyone telling you to send money in order to receive money you have supposedly earned is running a scam.

What AI has changed

The warning signs people were taught a decade ago have stopped working.

Broken English, obvious formatting errors and implausible company names were once reliable indicators. Generative tools have removed all three. Offer letters now read professionally. Recruiter profiles carry plausible histories and headshots. The FBI's IC3 has flagged AI-generated content as an emerging vector in its 2025 and 2026 reporting, including in video-based deception.

There is a specific consequence for job seekers. Video interviews are no longer proof of a real employer. Neither is a well-written job description, a convincing careers page, or a recruiter with a complete-looking LinkedIn profile.

What has not changed is the underlying economics. A scam must eventually extract money or identity data. That request is the reliable signal, and no amount of polish removes it.

This is why the four rules above are more useful than any "spot the typo" advice. They target the transaction rather than the presentation.

Who is being targeted

The exposure is not evenly distributed, and the pattern is counterintuitive.

A Norton survey of 1,000 US adults conducted by Dynata in November 2025 found roughly a third had encountered a job scam that year. Exposure skewed young: 44 percent of Gen Z respondents reported encountering one, against 21 percent of baby boomers. Only 61 percent of respondents felt confident they could identify a scam.

Younger job seekers face higher exposure partly because they apply in higher volume, partly because they are more active on the social platforms where scams now originate, and partly because the entry-level market is genuinely difficult. Entry-level professional postings have fallen 29 percent since January 2024. Scarcity produces urgency, and urgency is what scammers need.

Remote work seekers, caregivers, students and people re-entering the workforce appear repeatedly in the reported cases, for the same reason: flexible remote work is the promise that makes an unrealistic offer feel worth investigating.

How to verify a listing in two minutes

This sequence catches the large majority of fraudulent and pointless listings, and it is fast enough to run before every application.

Find the role on the company's own careers page. If a listing appears on Indeed or LinkedIn but not on the employer's own site, stop. This single check eliminates most fake postings, because scammers can post to aggregators but cannot publish to a real company's domain.

Check the email domain. Legitimate recruiters write from the company domain. Gmail, Outlook and lookalike domains with an extra letter or a hyphen are disqualifying.

Search the recruiter's name alongside the company. Real recruiters have a findable professional history connected to that employer. Ask yourself whether the profile existed before this month.

Look for a salary range. Eight states now require pay ranges in job postings. A missing range in those states means the listing is either unlawful or not a real vacancy, and it is a useful signal everywhere else.

Check the posting age and repetition. A listing under two or three weeks old is more likely to be active. The same role reappearing weekly from different recruiters usually indicates recycling rather than hiring.

None of this guarantees a legitimate employer. It reliably removes the obvious problems, which is most of them.

What platforms do and do not do

Major boards run automated fraud detection and remove listings that are reported. Indeed and LinkedIn both publish trust and safety information and both take down large volumes of fraudulent content.

What they cannot do is verify every posting before publication at the scale they operate. Aggregators also ingest listings automatically from other sources, which means a fraudulent posting can arrive through a pipeline no human reviewed.

Reporting matters more than it feels like it does. Platform removal happens faster with reports, and FTC data comes from consumer submissions at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The gap between 25,000 quarterly reports and the FTC's own estimate that fewer than one in ten victims report suggests the real scale is several times what any dataset currently shows.

If you have already engaged with one

Speed matters more than certainty here. Act on suspicion rather than waiting for proof.

If you sent money, contact your bank or the payment provider immediately and ask about reversal. Cryptocurrency transfers are generally irreversible, which is why scammers prefer them, but reporting still contributes to investigations.

If you deposited a cheque, tell your bank before spending any of it. Cheque fraud liability usually falls on the depositor once the cheque bounces.

If you shared identity documents or a Social Security number, place a fraud alert or credit freeze with the credit bureaus and monitor accounts closely. Identity misuse often appears months later.

Report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, to the platform where you found the listing, and to the BBB Scam Tracker.

Feeling embarrassed is the most common reason people do not report, and it is the reason the official figures understate the problem so badly. Roughly one in three people encountered a job scam in a single year. This is not a failure of individual judgment.

The honest summary

Indeed is legitimate. LinkedIn is legitimate. The listings on them are a mixed population, and the mix has got worse.

Reported losses rose from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024 and kept climbing through 2025. Task scams went from non-existent to roughly 40 percent of reports in four years. A third of the money lost now traces back to contact that began on social media rather than on a job board at all.

Against that, the defence is unglamorous and effective. Verify the role on the employer's own careers page before applying. Never pay to be hired. Never hand over banking or identity details before a signed offer. Treat unsolicited messages about remote work as fraudulent until proven otherwise.

Job scams do not succeed because people are careless. They succeed because the job market is hard enough that a good offer is worth believing. That is the part worth guarding against.

Image concepts

Primary (16:9): A job seeker at a laptop reviewing a listing, shot naturally, screen content not identifiable. Represents the reader's actual situation without implying a specific employer is fraudulent.
Alt text: Are jobs on Indeed legit: job seeker reviewing an online job listing on a laptop.

Second: A phone screen showing an unsolicited message about remote work, held in hand. Illustrates the social-media entry point identified in the FTC data.
Alt text: Unsolicited recruitment message about remote work arriving on a mobile phone.

Third: A simple bar chart showing FTC reported job scam losses by year from 2020 to 2024.
Alt text: Chart showing reported US job scam losses rising from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024.

Avoid hooded figures at keyboards and generic hacker imagery. Those read as stock illustration and suppress click-through.

Sources and verification notes

FTC Consumer Advice, Job Scams: reports tripled 2020–2024; losses $90M to $501M. https://consumer.ftc.gov/all-scams/job-scams FTC Consumer Sentinel Network: yearly loss figures ($90M 2020, $131M 2021, $179M 2022, $286M 2023, $501M 2024); Q4 2025 figures of $150.4M across ~25,000 reports, $2,000 median. FTC Data Spotlight, "Paying to get paid: gamified job scams drive record losses" (December 2024): task scam growth from zero in 2020 to ~20,000 in H1 2024; ~40% of 2024 reports; $41M crypto losses in H1 2024; the "never pay to get paid" guidance. FTC Data Spotlight (April 2026): about one in three 2025 job and business-opportunity scam losses began on social media. BBB Employment Scams Study (May 2026) and 2026 update: 23,234 Scam Tracker reports in one year, roughly double the prior year; ~$2,300 median task scam loss in 2025. FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report: $362.9M employment fraud losses; AI-generated content flagged as emerging vector. Norton / Dynata survey of 1,000 US adults (November 2025): ~one third encountered a job scam; 44% Gen Z versus 21% baby boomers; 61% confident in identifying one. Greenhouse data reported by the Wall Street Journal: 19% of Q2 2026 postings showed no hiring activity after applications, used only to distinguish ghost jobs from scams. FTC estimate that fewer than 10% of fraud victims report to a federal agency. All FTC and BBB figures should be linked to the primary source within the article and rechecked before publication, as both publish updated quarterly data.