How would you avoid getting "Jobfished"?

I've just finished watching the amazing documentary "Jobfished".

It tells the story of a group of people who were conned into working for a "fake" company. You can read the news article - it's pretty depressing stuff. In the middle of a pandemic, people were asked to work for what looked like an established media agency, for people who appeared to have a long history in the sector. The pay was commission only, with the promise of decent salaries in a few months. But several members of the senior team were imaginary. The client list was fictional. And the owner of the company appeared to be a fantasist - casually lying about their background and achievements. The whole thing collapsed in a pile of lies.

I have enormous sympathy for the victims. Mostly because I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to detect this scam!

Think about it - how could anyone detect this sort of scam? The company was legitimately registered at Companies House. It hadn't been registered for long - but that's expected at a startup, right?

The website looked slick and professional. It wasn't a generic WordPress template. This isn't like a 419 scam where the scammers target people who don't notice mistakes.

The employee photos were not of real employees - they were ripped off Getty Images and various other websites. OK, I know how to do a reverse image search - but they don't always work with cropped and/or recoloured images.

The founder had an extensive LinkedIn profile. In a large industry, I might know someone who knows them. It's a slightly awkward conversation to say "Hey, I'm applying for a job at X, I understand you know Y. What do you think of them?" - but it's doable. The only problem is that so many of the people I've added on LinkedIn are people I've met one time at a conference. I suspect that's true for lots of people. So what's the answer going to be? "Yeah, they seemed fine when I met them a decade ago."

Apparently lots of the text on the website was copied from other sites. Again, it's fairly easy to send a few text snippets to Google and see what that throws up. But what would possess you to do that?

When people turned up for an all-staff Zoom meeting, there were lots of people on there. That adds to the social pressure. How could all these people be fooled?

I have to stress, there seemed nothing obviously wrong with the Jobfishing offer. People weren't being offered too-good-to-be-true salaries. They weren't being asked to invest. They weren't part of a pyramid scam. What should have tipped them off? The fact that the founder gave them a bit of an ego flattering?

What should any normal person have done to check that this wasn't a scam?

Most people aren't trying to rip you off. It seem ridiculous that you'd go full Sherlock Holmes on every job offer you see. Right?

I'm also trying to think how this could have been worse.

This was all conducted online. But it's easy to rent a office - or co-working space - for a couple of days. If you turned up to a fancy office in the business district, would you think to question whether it was the company's permanent home or merely rented by the hour?

What if the scam company was masquerading as an established company? If you answered a job advert for, say, IBM - would it bother you if all the recruitment emails came from a domain like @ibm-recruitment.com?

What can you do? What can anyone do?

This isn't a problem which can be solved with technology. Putting everyone's CV on the BlockChain isn't going to stop grifters and scammers. I think - and it is only my opinion - that there's no way to protect ourselves from determined scammers. We just have to trust that most people aren't out to get us.