The short version: a genuine work from home vacancy has a named company you can verify, a real hiring manager on LinkedIn, no upfront payment of any kind, and a pay range that matches the actual market for the skill. If a listing asks you to buy a starter kit, pay for “training materials,” or send bank details before an interview, it’s fake, full stop.
Start with the company, not the job title
Most people read the job description first. That’s backwards. The description is the easiest part to fake because scammers just copy one from a real listing on Indeed or LinkedIn and change a few words. What’s harder to fake is a company’s history.
Search the company name plus “reviews,” plus “scam,” and plus “Glassdoor.” Look at how old the company’s website domain is (WHOIS lookup tools show you this for free in about ten seconds). A company that’s supposedly hiring 200 remote customer service agents but registered its domain three weeks ago is not a company you want anything to do with.
I had a client last year, a woman in her forties retraining after redundancy, who found a “brand ambassador” role paying £28 an hour for two hours a day. The company had a slick website, a LinkedIn page with 4,000 followers, and a job posting on three different boards. She almost applied until I asked her to check the LinkedIn page’s post history. Every single post was from the last six weeks, all stock photos, zero comments from real employees, and the “CEO” profile had 40 connections and no work history before 2025. That’s not a company. That’s a shell built to look like one.
The five checks that take twelve minutes total
I made a client of mine run through this exact sequence before applying anywhere, and it’s saved her from at least three obvious scams. Do it before you fill in a single form.
- Check one, two minutes: Search the exact job title plus the company name in quotation marks. If it only shows up on obscure job boards and nowhere on the company’s own careers page, be suspicious.
- Check two, two minutes: Look up the person named as the hiring manager on LinkedIn. Do they have a real history, real connections, real posts going back years? Or did their profile appear last month?
- Check three, three minutes: Search the company’s registered address on Google Street View if it’s UK based, or check it against Companies House if it claims to be a UK limited company. A registered address that’s a residential flat above a chip shop for a company claiming £2 million in revenue is a flag.
- Check four, two minutes: Read the email domain on any correspondence. A genuine company emails from @companyname.com. A scam emails from a Gmail or Outlook address “on behalf of” the company.
- Check five, three minutes: Search the phrase “any upfront cost” plus the company name. Real employers do not, under any circumstances, ask you to pay for equipment, training, background checks, or a starter kit before you’ve been paid a wage.
Twelve minutes. That’s the whole cost of ruling out the obvious scams before you invest an hour writing a cover letter.
The uncomfortable truth nobody tells you
Here’s the bit that annoys people when I say it out loud: most fake-looking work from home vacancies aren’t scams at all. They’re real jobs that were filled weeks ago and left live on purpose.
Companies leave listings up to keep a pipeline of CVs coming in, to make the company look like it’s growing, or because whoever posted it forgot to take it down. I’ve watched a genuine, well-known marketing agency leave a “remote content manager” role live on Indeed for four months after they’d hired someone, purely because the HR platform auto-renews unless someone actively cancels it. Nobody was being scammed. Nobody was even lying, exactly. But hundreds of people applied, heard nothing, and assumed either the job was fake or something was wrong with them.
That’s the honest problem with the whole “is this genuine” question. The binary of real versus scam misses the much bigger category: real but dead. If you’re searching job boards regularly, this is worth knowing before you burn a weekend tailoring five applications to a role that closed in March. My guide on how to search job boards for the newest work from home vacancies covers how to filter for listings posted in the last 24 to 48 hours specifically to avoid this exact trap.
Pay ranges tell you almost everything
A specific number that helps more than any red flag checklist: legitimate UK remote customer service roles pay between £11 and £14 an hour in 2026. Legitimate remote virtual assistant work through an agency pays £15 to £25 an hour depending on experience, and freelance VAs working direct with clients often charge £20 to £35 an hour once they’ve got a track record. Legitimate remote data entry, the boring but real kind, sits around £10 to £12 an hour.
If a listing offers £25 an hour for “simple data entry, no experience needed, work whenever you like,” that gap between the stated skill level and the pay is the tell. Scammers inflate the number because it’s the bait. Real employers know exactly what the market rate is because they’re competing against every other employer for the same candidates.
This is also where the virtual assistant space gets messy, because it’s one of the most heavily targeted categories for fake postings. If you’re looking specifically in that direction, my breakdown of what hirers need from a virtual assistant vacancy shows you what a real posting looks like from the employer’s side, which makes it much easier to spot the fakes by comparison. And if you want the real pay data broken down role by role, I’ve laid that out in the real numbers behind virtual assistant vacancies.
What a genuine hiring process looks like
Real companies, even small ones, follow a pattern that’s remarkably consistent:
- You apply through their own careers page or a recognised board like LinkedIn, Indeed, or a niche board relevant to the industry.
- You hear nothing for one to three weeks, because humans are slow and hiring managers have other jobs.
- If you’re shortlisted, you get a video call, not a text message conversation, with someone whose name and title you can verify.
- Any assessment or task is unpaid but reasonable, meaning it takes under two hours, not a full day’s work disguised as a “trial.”
- An offer, when it comes, includes a contract with a company name, a registered address, and terms that mention notice periods, tax status (employed or self-employed), and how you’ll be paid.
Scam recruitment, by contrast, moves fast. You’ll get a reply within hours, sometimes minutes, of applying. The “interview” happens over text message or WhatsApp. There’s pressure to decide quickly, often with language like “we need to fill this today.” Genuine hiring managers are never in that much of a hurry, because they know good candidates need time to think.
The specific scams still doing the rounds in 2026
A few patterns keep reappearing, dressed up differently each time:
- The reshipping scam: you’re hired as a “logistics coordinator” or “package inspector” and asked to receive parcels at your home and forward them elsewhere. This is almost always stolen goods laundering, and you can end up dealing with the police even though you never meant to do anything wrong.
- The check overpayment scam: you’re sent a check for equipment, told to deposit it and send the “extra” back via wire transfer. The check bounces days later and you’re liable for the full amount.
- The fake freelance writing agency: you’re offered a role writing for “clients,” asked to pay a small fee for a writer profile or portfolio hosting, then given no work. This one specifically targets people searching for flexible writing income, which is why I wrote a separate guide on how to find and apply to genuine freelance writer vacancies without falling into this trap.
- The “starter kit” data entry job: you pay £150 to £300 for training software or a laptop lease, then the company disappears or the “job” turns out to be unpaid data collection for someone else’s project.
Every one of these relies on the same emotional lever: you want the flexibility of working from home badly enough that you skip the boring verification step.
Where you’re searching matters more than people admit
Generic search terms like “remote jobs near me” pull in an enormous amount of noise, aggregator sites that scrape other job boards, expired listings, and outright fake postings designed purely to harvest email addresses for spam lists. I’ve written before about why that exact search is broken and what to search instead, and the short version is that going direct to company career pages and a handful of trusted niche boards beats a broad Google search almost every time.
If you’re specifically after virtual assistant work, which is one of the fastest growing genuine remote categories right now, it’s worth seeing the full range of what’s out there and what each type pays, which I’ve mapped out in 15 real virtual assistant roles and their real pay for 2026, so you know what you’re comparing a suspicious listing against.
Trust your gut, then check it with facts
Here’s my honest rule after years of watching people get burned and watching people talk themselves out of great opportunities out of pure paranoia: if a listing feels slightly too good, it’s worth twelve minutes of checking, not immediate rejection. Some genuine companies do pay well for remote work, some do move fast because they’re desperate to fill a role, and some do have small teams with thin LinkedIn presences because they’re new. The checks above are there to separate those cases from the scams, not to make you suspicious of every remote opportunity that exists.
The real skill isn’t spotting one obvious fake ad. It’s building a habit, twelve minutes, five checks, every single time, so that after a month you can tell within thirty seconds which listings deserve your time and which ones don’t.
Frequently asked questions
Can a genuine company ever ask for personal details early in the process?
Yes, but only limited details needed to run a right-to-work or background check, and only after you’ve had at least one real conversation with a named person. Your full bank details, National Insurance number, or a copy of your passport should never be requested before an interview has happened.
Is it a bad sign if a work from home job has no salary listed?
Not automatically. Some genuine UK employers still avoid publishing salary bands, though this is changing fast as transparency rules tighten. It becomes a red flag when it’s combined with vague duties, urgency language, or a request for payment of any kind.
Why do scam job listings often look more professional than real ones?
Because scammers copy the exact wording and layout from real corporate job ads, sometimes word for word, and pair it with stock photography and paid-for LinkedIn followers. A polished appearance tells you nothing about whether the job or the company behind it is real.
What should I do if I think I’ve already given information to a fake employer?
Contact your bank immediately if you shared any financial details, change any passwords you may have reused, and report it to Action Fraud if you’re in the UK or the FTC if you’re in the US. Report the listing to the job board it appeared on so it gets pulled down before it catches anyone else.
