If You Received a Text Saying "High-Profit Part-Time Job in a Short Time," Be Careful... New Phishing Scam on the Rise

76% of Phishing Texts in Q3 Use Tactics
“Short-Term High-Profit Part-Time Jobs” Lure to Steal Money

Recently, phishing text messages (smishing) that deceive people by claiming to recruit for short-term part-time jobs and extort money have been rampant, requiring caution.

According to the Q3 phishing text statistics released on the 27th by the cybersecurity company AhnLab, text scams disguised as short-term part-time job recruitment accounted for 76.4% of the total.

The short-term part-time job text scam is a newly discovered fraud method this quarter, along with Chuseok and Telegram disguise messages. In other words, it means that this new method is being attempted most frequently as soon as it appears.

The short-term part-time job recruitment phishing lures victims by promising high earnings in a short time and extorts large sums of money. First, it recruits part-time workers for activities such as product testing groups, paying a small amount of profit to make it seem like a genuine earning activity. Once trust is established, it uses the bait of high earnings to receive a large amount of cash and then disappears.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

In the case of victim A, after receiving such a guidance message, they started part-time work including product testing group activities and shopping mall purchase agency. The method was to purchase products from designated online shopping malls and receive 10% of the purchase amount as profit upon verification.

The phishing organization repeatedly requested A to make purchases on behalf of them, saying “You must complete the specified number of times to settle the profit.” When A requested a mid-term settlement, the organization only repeated excuses such as the shopping mall closure and sanctions from the Financial Supervisory Service blocking withdrawals. Eventually, A suffered a loss of about 4.2 million KRW. Given the surge in short-term part-time job phishing in the Q3 phishing text statistics, there are concerns that more cases like A’s may increase.

AhnLab explained, “Phishing text methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated and cannot be completely blocked, but they can be sufficiently prevented by following security rules in daily life.”

AhnLab specifically urged to follow security rules such as ▷not clicking URLs included in message bodies ▷searching suspicious sender numbers on the internet ▷being cautious if words like ‘international sender’ or ‘overseas sender’ are included ▷being wary of friend requests on messenger applications (apps) or contact requests through messenger apps and Band open chat rooms.

Meanwhile, in the Q3 phishing text statistics, the second most common method after short-term part-time job recruitment texts was impersonation of family members (7.0%). This was followed by impersonation of institutions (7.0%), parcel delivery impersonation (3.6%), government subsidy disguise (3.4%), and false payment content disguise (1.9%).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.