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Agencies "powerless" to address rising tide of recruitment fraud

Recruiters are largely "powerless" to stop the high volume of scamming that is targeting jobseekers and damaging the industry's reputation, says an agency leader.

Smaart Recruitment has been dealing with the scams for about eight months now, starting when candidates began contacting the company to confirm whether someone – who had sent them a "weird message" on Facebook or WhatsApp – was a Smaart consultant as they claimed, director Maarten Roosenburg tells Shortlist.

Initially it was only fake names being used – "so consultants who have never worked at Smaart" – and a quick Facebook search revealed hundreds of profiles with the same name, all claiming to work for Smaart in the UK, despite the company only having Australian headcount of about 30 consultants.

Roosenburg says his company was receiving four-to-five calls a day from jobseekers who had been promised a job in return for a cash payment or for purchasing products...