Recruitment fraud works because the person being targeted is doing everything right. They are looking for work, they are willing to invest in getting it, and they are used to processes that involve paperwork and fees. An offer that arrives with forms, a schedule and an invoice looks like diligence rather than a warning.
The good news, relative to other categories, is that this one has a definitive check available — and it is free.
The check that settles most cases
Recruitment for overseas employment is licensed. An agency placing Filipino workers abroad must hold a licence from the Department of Migrant Workers (which took over the functions of the former POEA), and the register of licensed agencies is public.
So, before anything else:
- Get the agency's exact registered name — not the recruiter's name, not the Facebook page name, the company name.
- Check it against the DMW list of licensed agencies, and check the status, not merely the presence of the name. Licences are suspended and cancelled, and a cancelled agency still appears in search results and still has a website.
- Check the job order exists. A licensed agency is recruiting for specific, approved orders. An agency that is licensed in general but cannot show an approved order for the role it is offering you is a different problem from an unlicensed one, but it is still a problem.
- For local work, check the company is registered — SEC for corporations, DTI for sole proprietorships — and that the address is real.
What a legitimate recruiter does not do
- Collect a placement fee before you are deployed, or ask for it in cash, by e-wallet, or to a personal account rather than the company's.
- Charge for the interview itself, or for "processing" a job that has not been offered to you yet.
- Conduct the entire process on a messaging app with no office you can attend and no landline.
- Press you to decide within hours on an overseas role that starts in two months.
- Ask for your passport, NBI clearance and bank details before any written offer exists.
Where this gets genuinely difficult
Legitimate recruitment does involve costs, and some of them are properly yours: medical examinations, documentation, training certificates. So "they asked me for money" is not on its own the distinguishing feature, and advice that says otherwise leaves people unable to tell the two apart.
The distinctions that hold up are what the money is for, when it is asked for, who it is paid to, and whether you get a receipt in the company's name. A clinic fee paid to a clinic is ordinary. The same amount paid in cash to a recruiter, for a job that does not yet formally exist, is not.
Newer variants worth knowing
Task and commission work
An offer of simple paid tasks — liking videos, writing reviews, completing small jobs in an app. Early tasks pay out, reliably and in full. Then a larger batch requires a deposit to unlock, and the deposits escalate. The early payouts are real money, and they are the cost of the method, not evidence against it.
Placements that are not the job described
Some overseas offers in the region have turned out to be recruitment into compounds where the "work" is running scams against other people, with documents confiscated on arrival. Offers of well-paid customer-service or data-entry roles abroad, requiring no relevant experience, arranged through an intermediary who handles the travel, deserve serious care. If an offer of this shape reaches you, treat the licence check as essential rather than a formality.
The employer who does not know
Real companies are impersonated. A recruiter may use a genuine firm's name, logo and even a real employee's identity. Verifying the company exists is not the same as verifying this person represents it — so contact the company through a number you found yourself, not one you were given.
If you have already paid
- Stop paying. Requests will continue, and each will be framed as the last step before release of what you are owed.
- Keep the evidence — conversations, receipts, the account name and number the money went to, the advertisement itself.
- Report to the DMW if overseas recruitment was involved. Illegal recruitment is a specific offence with its own penalties, and the department maintains its own enforcement function.
- Report to the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group or the NBI where the offer and payments happened online.
- Tell the platform the advert appeared on.
If you are still deciding, the order that costs least is simple: check the licence first, pay nothing until you have, and get every promise in writing in the company's name.
Check a name, number or handle
Our register holds reports the public has sent us. Searching it is free and takes a moment. It is one check among several — a name that is not in it has not been cleared, only not reported to us.
Search the register