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It was 2:27 p.m. on a Wednesday when the offer first came in, via text message. You know the type:
Hi there! Sorry to interrupt. I’m from Indeed. We’re currently recruiting remote product testers (U.S.-based). This role lets you earn $50–$400 per day by spending just 60–120 minutes daily testing and reviewing new products or services online.
It was not the first time I’d been offered such a plum appointment. And it certainly was not the most persuasive-looking proposal. This one came from an iMessage account with a +63 country code—the Philippines, which has certain associations with digital scammery—and arrived in the form of a group chat, with two other unfamiliar numbers. Despite our apparently exceptional individual qualifications, they hadn’t even bothered to single us out with separate messages.
Which is all to say: In the annals of what seems to be one of the lowest-effort scams currently running rampant across America, this felt like an especially low-effort attempt. One of the members of our group chat, with a 571 area code, had the good sense to leave the conversation immediately. In any other case, I would have also reported the message as junk and gone on, mildly concerned about how my number had been acquired until the next, near-identical text proposition rolled in, probably within the next day or two.
But this time, I wondered what was actually on the other side of this obvious scam campaign. How could this possibly be working? What were they after? Who could be falling for such an entreaty, one that requires a substantial misunderstanding of online job postings, of the internet, of contemporary employment? And then I realized: The answer should probably be me.
So I responded. Despite the promise of generous compensation, same-day payment, minimal hours, and work-from-home flexibility, I was soon told that the only qualification for employment was that I be 25 years or older. I confirmed I met that requirement.
“Thank you!” my recruiter replied. Did I detect a hint of surprise in this response? “The manager will reach out to you on WhatsApp with more details.”
Soon, I met someone named Cathy. And so began a saga that went deeper—and got much weirder—than I ever imagined.
Anyone with a cellphone has been propositioned at least once by this type of arrangement: the recruiter with a great offer to earn extra money, and with very little required of you. Some people told me they get the messages almost daily, if not more often. Indeed, according to the Federal Trade Commission, these sorts of scams have exploded in recent months.
“We’ve seen these sorts of things skyrocketing,” Kati Daffan, assistant director of the FTC’s division of marketing practices, told me when I reached out to her about my new job offer. Task scams in particular, the type I had stumbled into, have soared year over year. In 2023 there were 5,000 reports of task scams filed with the FTC; in the first six months of 2024, there were 20,000, with reported losses topping $220 million in those two quarters alone—and Daffan believes that the actual numbers are far higher.
“Many people experience fraud and never complain to anyone about it. Only 4.8 percent of people ever complain to a government entity, so the real number is much, much higher,” she said.
So what was I getting myself into? “Some of these over the years have been set up mainly to seek people’s personal information; many end up getting money from you,” she said. “Even if you seem to be working, there may not be any real work going on there.”
This could take a number of forms. I might be called upon to ship packages or purchase gift cards or serve as a virtual assistant. I might be depositing fake checks or working for the “postal service” or headhunting. Most likely, though, I would be doing simple repetitive tasks, liking videos, or rating images, in the good name of “product boosting” or “app optimization.” All of these piecemeal undertakings have been gathered up under the aegis of the task scam, which would cross over from pointless to exploitative when the recruiter either refused to pay me or asked me to start sending them money.
Some of this was a technological phenomenon, the FTC told me. The widespread adoption of cryptocurrency has made it easier for these sorts of operations to spirit money away from unsuspecting people at lightning speeds. The proliferation of A.I. has made light work of coding dummy websites, spoofing business profiles, scouring LinkedIn for job seekers and easy marks, replicating the language of the fast-changing internet economy, even in translation.
Much of it, too, is an economic phenomenon. With the retrenchment of pandemic-era work-from-home arrangements, remote work is harder to find and more desirable than ever. The slow softening of the labor market amid Trump-era economic uncertainty and longer stays on unemployment rolls has pushed people to seek work in uncommon places.
These sorts of scams also, inevitably, target immigrants and older adults—people with limited English proficiency or digital literacy unaware of the cascade of typos that might sound an alarm, or people with limited online experience who don’t understand how job boards work now.
There’s also the thing that the kind people at the FTC were too diplomatic to say, which is that President Donald Trump has taken a battle-ax to the very departments that once existed to do scam prevention and enforcement, like, for instance, the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and parts of the Department of Justice. The heads of those places have been fired or have stepped down, sometimes replaced by crypto industry toadies. Their budgets have been hit. Trump has embraced the cryptocurrency industry that makes it all go. Congress just passed a new sweetheart bill for the industry, called the GENIUS Act, in bipartisan fashion. There are many more scams than before, and it is a growth industry. It is a great time to be a scammer.
On WhatsApp, I met Cathy, my “coach,” from a company she referred to as Interleave. She had gotten my number, she said, from “Elena who works in Indeed Recruitment Department” and was eager to work with me. Her number had a 424 area code, or Los Angeles. (Indeed is its own company—it essentially offers a job board—and I have no reason to believe that it was actually involved at all.)
Cathy was not altogether patient. When I didn’t respond within two hours, she sent me a voice note that sounded sort of humanoid: “Hello, are you still there?” The next day, she called me and I missed it. When I did respond, via WhatsApp message, she was curt: “Hello, you finally replied to my message. I thought you were taken away by aliens.”
I was going to be doing “music promotion,” I was told. It would take just one or two hours a day. “We use an A.I.–powered system developed by Interleave to help increase the play count of music singles and albums,” Cathy told me, on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. In effect, we were going to be boosting play counts: “Artificial intelligence cannot do this, only real people can participate,” she said. “All we need to do is create a personal account on the Interleave platform, use our real information, and create real playback records.”
Like so many middle school girlfriends, Interleave was based in Canada. The compensation was similarly sketchy. I’d get $100 for two days of work. For 30 days, I’d get $8,200, though it would all have to be routed through a crypto wallet. The job and the compensation had nothing to do with the original text I’d received, but no matter.
Besides, this wasn’t just crude self-enrichment, Cathy said. Interleave was going to “donate a portion of its profits to the World Food Programme charity to help those who really need help gain a brighter life.”
It was time for my training, and I began to panic a little. I was using my real information, plus they had my phone number and my WhatsApp. I was trying to anticipate all the ways they could be scheming to rip me off, and I was not eager to find out.
I didn’t respond for a few days. Cathy messaged me, “Wishing you a meaningful Juneteenth!” Other pleasantries followed. Finally, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize with a 669 area code (central California), and I answered it. An annoyed, non-native-English-speaking but definitely human Cathy was on the other end. “Do you want this job or not?” she demanded. “Yes, sorry,” I said.
The next day, she smoothed things over with some rapid-fire volleys:
Good morning, it’s a new day again. May the beautiful sunshine brighten your mood and may good luck be with you.
Good afternoon! Hope your day is going well.
Hey are you busy?
Are you busy?
I took precautions. I consulted with Slate’s IT department, which loaned me an old burner laptop empty of personal (and company) information, just in case.
On the new computer, I typed the URL Cathy provided me into the browser. Chrome wouldn’t even load the page, seemingly for security reasons, but Safari let me in. I set up a training username and password, forking over my email in the process. Cathy promised me between $70 and $150 for my onboarding, and we got to work.
The login page featured an eerie photo of a male mannequin. The site itself, once I logged in, featured clips from video games, playing on a loop, and logos of video game companies. There, also, was the World Food Programme logo. (This is a real United Nations organization that was also certainly not actually involved.) Front and center were my wallet balance, already $1,085, my profit earned ($0), and my “frozen amount,” which went unexplained.
Thus began an incredible transaction of screenshots. With every individual click, Cathy required me to send her a screenshot of my browser. She would annotate each image with an arrow, directing my next move, and send it back. I tried in vain to figure out what information she could possibly be gleaning from these photos.
I was instructed to click the Start button at the bottom of the page. Up popped a three-by-three grid of album covers, with another Start button in the middle. Click that, Cathy instructed me. The album covers fluttered like the display on a slot machine. Then one was highlighted, deemed a “success,” given five stars, and assigned an amount and a profit. I tried to ask what that meant, but Cathy didn’t want me asking too many questions; we were moving slow enough as it was. I had never seen any of these album covers before, nor did they belong to artists I had ever heard of. Still, I sent Cathy the screenshots. Click Confirm, she said, then do it again.
“So I’m just hitting ‘start’ and ‘confirm’ over and over?” I asked. “45 times?”
“Yes,” she said.
I was a quick study, it turned out. Despite our rocky start, I was proving adept. In fact, I soon realized I could click both Start and Confirm without even moving the mouse. I was riding high.
And then, 40 clicks in, the program froze. Instead of “Success,” my click yielded “Pending.” What does this mean, I asked Cathy, sending a screenshot.
“You are very smart. This surprises me. It seems you have very good luck today, thank you for bringing me good luck,” she texted. “You met the music bunble.”
(I’m pretty sure Cathy meant bundle. But sometimes when I texted bundle—and there were plenty of bundles in my future—Cathy would insist on referring to it as a bunble. So I just started referring to it as a bunble too.)
This seemed like good news, but then my account balance went to negative $291. There was a long, technical explanation for the bunble, which represented two or three low-performing songs at once, and why the bunble was going to earn me a commission “at least 6 times higher.” I texted Cathy, “I’m not sure I entirely understand but that’s fine.”
The important thing was that to dislodge the bunble, someone would have to pay. Because I was still in training, Cathy covered it. She asked me to contact “customer service,” another peculiar instruction, given that I was an employee and not a customer. The CS, as we were calling it, was just another WhatsApp account. I was instructed to ask for a Bitcoin wallet address from the CS, which I had to relay to Cathy. She then sent me a screenshot showing she’d sent $292 in Bitcoin, which I had to relay back to the CS account.
“Dear esteemed collector, your account has been successfully funded,” the CS messaged me.
I did 90 more clicks, and my training was finished. Cathy congratulated me. “It’s easy, isn’t it,” she said.
Then she made the first ask.
“Before starting the next set of tasks, you need to ensure that the account balance is at least $100 US dollars to reset the next set of tasks. You have earned 85 US dollars through training, so you only need to add 18 US dollars.”
Was this finally the scam? After all that, they wanted just 18 bucks?
Well, this was why I had gotten into this business in the first place. So I opened Cash App and sent Cathy another ream of screenshots: She wanted evidence of my having verified my identity on the app, of my having purchased Bitcoin, of my having sent it. I had initially worried she was going to use them to hack that account—I thought about opening a new online bank account, with only a small amount of money in it, just in case my Cash App got commandeered—but then, well, I’d already done so much clicking. I let it ride.
There was one other problem. I bought the $18 in Bitcoin, but Cash App bled me for a $1 transaction fee just to buy it, then I had to buy $10 more to get up to the $18 total again (smaller purchases weren’t allowed). In the meantime, my Bitcoin had already plummeted in value. Someone should invent a currency that’s just the amount that it is. This was turning into a very expensive transaction.
Thankfully, Cathy was a forgiving boss. I bargained her down for my troubles. I sent $17, and the next day I was back to work.
Every day I worked, I clicked in the same spot 80 times, then sent a screenshot to the Customer Service account on WhatsApp, whose number changed daily. Because of my novice status, I was allowed only two sets of tasks a day. Was I working in a real click farm or a fake click farm? It seemed entirely possible that this “labor” I was engaged in could have been real and profitable. It also might have been window dressing.
The phenomenon of “streaming farms”—a process by which fraudsters juice play counts, particularly of A.I.–generated music, on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music—is now rampant. In the same way people once paid for followers, they can, too, pay for plays, which will elevate songs into relevance for algorithms, TikTok placement suggestions, and more.
We tend to think of these as bot-driven campaigns. But in recent years, punishingly cheap labor has turned out to be hidden beneath “automation” of all types—teams of barely remunerated workers in the developing world doing simple tasks being passed off as A.I. since its early days.
Perhaps I had joined the ranks of the global internet proletariat, hammering clicks on the abstracted factory floor of the future? That seemed like a triumph of reshoring if so. Here I was, working in what seemed to be a Philippine scam farm as a U.S. citizen—and I was clawing back jobs from the automation revolution in the process. Trump’s pro-scam agenda was bringing back American jobs after all. And compared to recent reports from the UN, which found that scam farms in Southeast Asia are routinely staffed by slaves subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse, I was being treated quite well. I just hadn’t gotten paid yet.
Still, there were certainly signs it was all for show. The company had its “business certificate” listed on the website, an official-looking document claiming that the company was recognized in Markdale, Ontario. I reached out to the official Ontario Business Registry and sent the certificate for review. “The ministry has no record of a registration under the Business Names Act for a corporation or general partnership with the name ‘Interleave, Inc,’ ” the organization told me.
Still, just because it wasn’t Canadian didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
After days of clicking, my “profit” climbing steadily, I met with a few members of the development team at Slate and showed them my work. Could they, with some actual technical literacy, make sense of what was going on? They took over my laptop and inspected the front-end of the page, watching requests and responses. The album covers were real, even if they looked A.I.–generated and belonged to bands of unknown provenance. There was definitely some data being sent, even if it didn’t seem to be related to anything on the current page. It seemed possible that my clicks were being captured to beat captchas or overcome security measures that target bots.
In other words: There was a chance I was doing something real, or real-ish. And with that possibility came a conviction: I started to think I could sincerely make some money on this. If the click farm was real, it would stand to reason that probably there was money being sent back and forth. I combed through Reddit and found someone who claimed to have successfully withdrawn money, netting roughly $1,000 thanks to some well-timed resignations. Surely I could outsmart Cathy and the CS and cash out myself? I was not a retiree or new to his country. I had gone to college, and graduated.
The next day, I noticed a new status on Cathy’s WhatsApp account: “Wealth is a compensation for cognition, not a reward for hard work,” it read.
I wanted to believe. Maybe not that Cathy and I were making each other rich, as she would often text me, but at least that we could scam each other. I didn’t realize it was the beginning of the end.
One day, Cathy got banned from WhatsApp. She resurfaced under a new number, a 646 area code, New York City, and a very different-looking person in the profile picture. “I added too many students from all over the country,” she told me. “I am very sorry for this.”
This wasn’t terribly surprising. Each day the Customer Service account on WhatsApp had a different number, which meant that every day that I logged in and worked, I had to text a different number to reset my tasks.
I took many days off, but Cathy remained supportive. Every morning, she would text me: “Good morning. Wish you to have a great day.” One morning, after a weekend away, she said: “I’m worried about you.”
Despite my shoddy work ethic, and despite the fact that I’d still ponied up only $17, Cathy remained warm and supportive. “I’m your mentor and your friend,” she told me once. She was glad I’d had a festive Fourth of July.
We were also getting to know each other. She had come to the United States after a divorce. She was unable to work after things went south with her husband, she said, so she took to traveling, leaving her hometown of Enschede, in the Netherlands, which she confusingly spelled “Enskod.” (I asked a Dutch friend if anyone might use this spelling, and she said no.)
In the States, she told me, she lived with her aunt and worked as a waiter in a restaurant. The work was punishing. She was often harassed by men, she said, which led her in search of a remote job.
Then, her luck began to change. She met “a sister” at the restaurant, named Julia, she said, changing to present tense: “She is 3 years older than me. We work together every day. She takes good care of me. When I am harassed by customers, she always comes forward to help me solve the problem.”
Not just that, but Julia also had a bead on part-time remote work. The two of them quit the restaurant together. Cathy had been working full time at her part-time remote job for 10 months now, she said, and she had taken Julia out to a big dinner. “I am very grateful to her for guiding me to earn more income from this job and for changing my perceptions and ideas about life through this job.”
“That is very moving,” I told her.
She had come a long way from her childhood in the Netherlands, she said. I asked if she, as an immigrant, was worried about the current climate and ICE raids in the country. She said no.
I was one of 20 people working for her, she said, from all over the world. “I am 35 years old,” she said, “I like to listen to music, read books, and travel.” “I am 32,” I told her, “and I also like those things.”
At this same time, I got a notification on my LinkedIn page that someone named Ma. Rizza Malaga, a virtual assistant with Work at Home Jobs from Legaspi, in the Philippines, had viewed my account.
“Are you based in the Philippines?” I asked Cathy. “Why do you say that,” she shot back. “I am in Arlington, Virginia, USA.”
The friction increased after I tried to cash out without her permission, something I had initially been told I could do every day. I hit the withdrawal button on the website—I was up over $70 at that point, which felt like a pretty good return on my $17—when the bad news came from Customer Service. “Great collector,” said the CS, “your withdrawal has been rejected.”
The next day, now up to $125, I tried again. “Great collector,” said the CS, “when your withdrawal is approved, you need to deposit $100 again to apply for the reset task. Because the reset task requires an account balance of 100.”
OK, fine, I said. I will withdraw $25 and leave $100 in the account.
“Great collector, each withdrawal must be made in full. It is not possible to withdraw only part of the funds.”
I texted Cathy, who was not sympathetic. “You didn’t listen to me and you didn’t confirm with CS,” she said. “So the failure to withdraw funds is our own problem.”
I did confirm, I told her. “Can you tell me why you disappear so often,” she shot back. “You are not familiar with this job yet and not clear about the various processes of this job.”
Things were tense, and then I hit another bunble.
This was enough to get me back in Cathy’s good graces; it also meant I had to put up another $79 to get my account “dislodged.” The website insisted I would have to act within 24 hours to clear up the bunble. I dithered for days, but no matter. They still wanted $79.
At this point, it was pretty obvious that I was prohibited from cashing out. But, I thought, how many people would really stick with this without even getting one payout as proof of concept? So I paid the parade of fees to Cash App, bought more Bitcoin, and sent it along.
Even Cash App, which had no trouble ripping me off in its own way, was alarmed by the decision. I had to make a secondary avowal that I was not getting scammed and would not come back for reimbursement.
At the very least, I thought, I’d bought myself some more time to figure out my next move. Then, on my very next set of tasks, I hit another bunble. “Wow, oh my god, this is awesome,” Cathy said.
I was not so pleased. I now had to pay $350 in Bitcoin to dislodge my account.
I was at an impasse. It was clear where this whole thing was headed. I wasn’t going to throw another $350 at that, was I?
The CS seemed to have caught on to my ambivalence. I received an additional $100 “salary” into my account that I couldn’t cash out, and an even more tantalizing offer beyond that: The company wanted to “give some random gifts to employees from time to time so that the employees can experience it.” All I needed to do was send along my “regular” email address and residential address.
I wasn’t going to do that. Right? No. No.
I finally told myself it was over.
But I had one more thing I knew I had to do. I had to confront Cathy. I was dreading that as much as I had dreaded getting scammed.
I finally went on WhatsApp and told the truth. I told Cathy that I was writing about my experience working this job at my real job, and told her that this whole operation seemed an awful lot like a scam.
“You haven’t even started the job yet and you’re already saying this is a scam,” she shot back. “I have been helping you withdraw funds but you always don’t reply to my messages.”
She asked, “Do you think this is my fault?”
Cathy was insistent that I could cash out as soon as I finished my tasks, which would be unlocked as soon as I put up the $350. She was unfazed by my accusations.
As I had drudged on with Cathy, I thought back to the infamous Nigerian prince scam, the great phishing attempt that seemingly defined the early internet. What a quaint and bygone era that was. Now we have seen trillions of dollars put toward radically overhauling the nature of interpersonal communication, of commerce, the great global reach of the internet and its incredible world-shrinking power. More than 5.5 billion people are online. The capabilities of microchips have increased 100,000-fold in the past 30 years; computing power doubles every 18 months. We have crossed the threshold of A.I., this newest digital chapter that is supposed to make the previous three decades look basically analog by comparison. This whole march of human cultural production—incalculable progress—and the one constant that has survived and adapted and thrived? The scam. What was the point of it all? Here I had been clicking in the same place on a fake website every day and texting furiously, with a real person, both of us sort of lying about our true motivations.
In the end, I arrived at a simple truth. Over the course of two months, “Cathy” had run me for $96.
After I confronted her, I tried to log in to the site one last time, and not a single browser would load the website. I texted Cathy, asking why the site had disappeared. She sent me a new URL. This was all part of regular maintenance, she assured me. Nothing to worry about.
I assumed that would be that. But then the next Monday morning came around, and I had another WhatsApp message waiting for me from Cathy: “Good morning! I hope you have a good day.”
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