What Happened When Writer Responded to Scam Text About Dream Job (Exclusive)

Tens of thousands of people across the country reported scam job offer texts last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and for many, they’ve become a near-daily game of read-and-delete.

The routine typically follows a familiar pattern: a message arrives from an oddly long email address or an unknown foreign number offering a flexible work-from-home setup, then wary recipients hit the “report junk” option or immediately swipe to erase the grammatically incorrect proposition without much consideration about what — or who — is on the other side of the screen.

But journalist Alex Sammon decided to do the opposite, for a strange and illuminating new investigation for Slate.

Sammon, 32, chronicled a series of increasingly odd interactions that ensued after he purposely took the bait from a fake recruiter who sent a group text message ostensibly offering a remote product testing gig.

Eventually, Sammon followed the virtual thread across the globe to what appeared to be a Philippines-based click farm operation.

His feature, published on Monday, Aug. 4, is called, “I Responded to One of the Spam Texts From a “Recruiter”—Then Took the Job. It Got Weirder Than I Could Have Imagined.”

The only requirement for the job was being 25 years or older.

After confirming and accepting the initial offer, Sammon was connected to someone who introduced herself as Cathy and said she worked for a company called “Interleave.”

She said he would be working on “music promotion” by increasing play counts through repetitive clicks.

“Artificial intelligence cannot do this, only real people can participate,” Cathy told him. “All we need to do is create a personal account on the Interleave platform, use our real information, and create real playback records.”

Using a loaner laptop from Slate for security, Sammon underwent “onboarding,” during which he was sent a URL and required to log in and send a screenshot for Cathy to mark up and return after each repetitive onscreen click.

“It’s easy, isn’t it,” she messaged him after his purported training session concluded.

She quickly led Sammon down a task scam rabbit hole that involved extended WhatsApp communication, ferrying messages to and from “customer service,” and Bitcoin purchases to meet a minimum account balance before he could continue with more clicking tasks.

Through it all, he was never able to cash out his listed earnings — but lost less than $100 in the name of journalistic research.

“I would like to thank Cathy and the Customer Service for all the time and effort they put into making me the best potentially fake click farm employee I could be,” Sammon says in a tongue-in-cheek statement to PEOPLE. “It’s true what they say; the relationships are really the best part of the international digital scam economy. I only wish I had a better work ethic, and Cathy continues to text me expressing dismay at my attendance and performance.”

“In seriousness,” he adds, “I think this bizarre intersection of grindset attitudes, new digital technologies, general lawlessness, and socially useless labor does say something very true about our contemporary moment.”

Though Sammon says “I still don’t know the scope of the operation, how many people were involved, or even if it was a real click farm, I think there’s something meaningful about the fact that beneath much of this supposedly automated technology are still real people, cleaning up AI datasets or, you know, bilking you for bitcoin on the margins.”

The scourge of scammers

The digital landscape continues to evolve, yet the scammers persist, sometimes with devastating consequences for their victims.

In gamified job scams like the one Sammon seems to have experienced, the FTC says crooks are able to trick people into sending money while making victims believe they’re earning it.

“At some point, they’ll say you have to make a deposit to complete your next set of tasks and get your supposed earnings out of the app. You “charge up” your account to avoid losing what the app shows you’ve earned, believing you’ll get all the money you deposited back, along with your commission, once you complete the set,” the agency said online. “But no matter what the system says you’ve earned, you didn’t. That money isn’t real. And if you deposit money, you won’t get it back.”

In 2024, Americans reported $470 million in losses to text scams, more than fivefold the amount reported in 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Reported losses from gamified job scams alone, which often include repetitive tasks, rose by more three times between 2020 to 2023 and surpassing $220 million in the first half of 2024.

From January through June 2024, about 20,000 people reported this particular scam, “compared to about 5,000 in all of 2023,” the agency said online. “Since the vast majority of frauds are not reported, this likely reflects only a fraction of the actual harm.”

While instances of task scams have ballooned in recent years, online romance scams, sometimes called “pig butchering” have plagued people for years, reaching reported losses of $1.14 billion in 2023, according to the FTC.

In 2022, then-NBC News reporter Jacob Ward spoke with a former Nigerian romance scammer who spent five years targeting American women and eventually conned one out of $20,000 before confessing out of guilt. The man, who identified himself as Chris, pointed to desperation and a lack of jobs nationwide.

“I have three adult siblings and none of them has a job,” Chris said.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Four years ago, then-Washington, D.C. based news anchor Jeannette Reyes opted for a lighthearted approach when a scam caller, in a bid to obtain her credit card information, told her there was a warrant for her arrest due to a mysterious $2,500 debt.

“We can clear up this matter if you’re able to make a payment right now,” an unidentified man told her in a phone call shared by FOX affiliate WTTG in June 2021.

In response, Reyes told him her credit card number was “3, 2, 1” before slipping into a more formal anchor voice and adding, “Good evening, we are live on television right now with an investigation into scam callers. We have the FBI on the line, they are tracking this phone number as we speak. Sir, what is your full name again?”

Within seconds, the caller promptly hung up.