TOWSON GRADS TELLS

22-year-old shares nightmare of getting scammed by a fake job: ‘I went from excited to devastated in a month’

Jennifer Liu, CNBC

Callie Heim, 22, went viral on TikTok for sharing how she got scammed by a fake job listing. She hopes to raise awareness about fraudsters and keep other job-seekers safe.Courtesy of subject

Callie Heim was thrilled to start her marketing job with Waymo, the buzzy self-driving car company, earlier this summer. She’d had a tough year — her mom recently passed away, she moved back home and she was adjusting to life after college.

The job offer felt like a turning point: “I was at my lowest of lows and felt like I was on the come-up of some good things,” the 22-year-old Towson University grad tells CNBC Make It.

But elation quickly faded when she got a message from her new employer: Before she started, she’d have to buy her own laptop and work phone from a company portal, and they’d send her a check to cover the costs. When the check arrived in the mail, the alarm bells sounded off.

Heim had been scammed by a fake job listing.

‘I went from excited to devastated in a month’

In a series of TikTok videos that have since gone viral, Heim recounts how she applied to the job via LinkedIn’s “Easy Apply” function and went through what felt like a normal, even promising, interview process. First, she answered a few questions about her marketing background through Wire, an encrypted messaging app she was asked to download (a red flag, she now says).

She was invited to a phone interview the next day FINISH READING HERE

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