Work-from-home job scams promising monthly earnings of Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 are targeting women, students and unemployed people across Bengaluru and parts of Karnataka, with fraudsters demanding advance payments for jobs that often do not exist.
The offers are circulated through social media feeds, WhatsApp groups and websites, advertising home-based work such as agarbatti and candle packing, book-writing, data entry, product promotion and household-item assembly. Applicants are asked to pay registration fees, security deposits, training charges or processing fees before they can begin.
According to police, the fraud typically starts with a small payment that appears manageable. After the money is transferred, some victims lose contact with the recruiters immediately. In other cases, applicants are given minor assignments or token payments to establish trust before being persuaded to invest larger sums in return for promised higher earnings.
More than 600 people in the Bengaluru periphery were allegedly cheated after paying advance amounts for agarbatti and candle-packing work that never materialised, the report said. Complaints have also emerged from Haveri, where fraudsters allegedly collected crores of rupees by offering fake home-based packing jobs, and from Hosakote, where women reportedly lost money on similar offers.
Police believe the actual scale of the fraud is larger because many victims do not report relatively small losses. Shame, the expectation that the money will not be recovered and the difficulty of identifying online recruiters can keep complaints from reaching law-enforcement agencies. This under-reporting allows the operators to continue using new advertisements and fake profiles to approach more job seekers.
Women managing household responsibilities, students seeking part-time employment and unemployed youth are being targeted because they are actively searching for flexible income. The advertisements exploit that demand by presenting high earnings as achievable through only a few hours of work each day, while concealing the fact that the applicant is being asked to pay before receiving employment.
A woman from Doddaballapura told the report that she paid for a book-writing assignment intended to provide additional income for her family. After completing the work, she was unable to contact the organisers to receive payment and realised that she had been cheated.
Police have advised job seekers to verify companies before accepting home-based employment and to avoid offers that require registration fees, security deposits or other advance payments. Suspicious advertisements and transactions should be reported to the nearest police station. The latest complaints show how digital recruitment channels are being used to turn the search for flexible work into a payment trap for vulnerable households.
