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, where the interviewer said the job would entail getting a computer and phone to do her job remotely. She then got another phone call the day after with an offer (red flag No. 2, Heim says).
After a few more conversations, Heim filled out some employment forms, submitted a scan of…
