Bogus ads for Philippine statistics agency mislead jobseekers
- Published on October 14, 2023 at 11:14
- 3 min read
- By Jan Cuyco, AFP Philippines
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The bogus employment advertisement was published on Facebook on September 27, 2023 and has been shared more than 150 times.
It displays the logo of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and claims its Central Office is hiring an "order assistant" with a monthly salary of 34,000 to 55,000 Philippine pesos ($598 to $967).
Text in the video reads: "Work: Arranging orders, flexible time, low work requirements. Need a mobile phone or computer, need to have 2-3 hours free."
The video also says no work experience is needed and encourages people to "apply now" by clicking on a link, which leads to the landing page of a popular Philippine recruitment portal.
The Philippines recorded an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent in August 2023, meaning at least 2.21 million Filipinos are out of work (archived link).
The average monthly wage in 2022 was about 14,600 pesos ($257), according to the PSA's Occupational Wages Survey (archived link).
The fake advert has also been posted here on Facebook where it received up to 1.6 million views and 7,000 likes.
Comments under the posts suggested people believed the opening was genuine.
"How to apply?" one Facebook user asked.
"Is this work from home?" another said.
'Scam'
However, the PSA has denied any association with the purported job ad and said the "order assistant" position does not exist.
"This is not affiliated with PSA. Upon verifying, this is a scam," a spokesperson for the agency told AFP on October 10.
It added that the agency only advertises job vacancies on its website and official Facebook page.
A search on the PSA's careers portal did not yield any results for the role of "order assistant".
A reverse image search on Google reveals the misleading post took the design of a job advertisement previously posted on the local careers website Philippine Go, which contains details of an opening published on the PSA's official Facebook page (archived links here and here).
The misleading post and the job listing published on the Philippine Go website both contain the same image along with the PSA logo and the text "Central Office" at the top.
But the fake job advertisement uses an inconsistent layout and writes the date of the deadline in Tagalog while the rest of the post is in English.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the false Facebook video (left) and the advert on Philippine Go (right):
AFP has previously debunked other fake job ads including here, here and here.
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