How to Spot a Fake Job Ad in the UK: There Is a Legal Line, and Scams Cross It

If you are job hunting in the UK, you have a test available to you that American job seekers do not: a bright legal line that most job scams have to cross to work.

Under Section 6(1) of the Employment Agencies Act, as the government's own guidance on the Conduct Regulations puts it, "an employment agency or employment business must not charge a work-seeker a fee for finding them work, unless you're an employment agency operating in the entertainment and modelling sectors."

That is the whole test, and it is unusually clean. An agency may sell you something unrelated, such as a CV service, and charge for that. What it may not do is charge you for finding you work, or make its work-finding conditional on you buying something else. So when a message asks for money before a job materializes, you are not weighing a hunch about tone or a typo in the sender's address. You are looking at conduct that is already outside the rules.

What the police actually call it

The official term is employment fraud, and the description is blunt. The UK's fraud reporting service defines it as what happens "when a fraudster claims to be a recruitment agent, hiring you for a job, which can be in a foreign country, that doesn't exist."

Two useful things follow from that wording.

The role does not exist at all. This is not a real vacancy that has been left open too long, and it is not a company collecting CVs for later. There is no job.

And the fraudster is impersonating a recruiter, because that is the role that makes the rest of the script plausible. Recruiters ask for personal details. Recruiters arrange payroll. A scam that opens as a hiring manager has to explain why it needs your passport scan; one that opens as an agency does not.

The shapes the money takes

The fee rarely arrives called a fee. In the cases that get reported it wears a costume, and the costume is usually one of these:

Equipment you have to buy before you start. A laptop, a headset, a software license, always from a supplier the "employer" nominates, always reimbursed in your first month's pay.

A check or certificate you have to pay for. A DBS check, a right-to-work verification, a compliance course. Real employers who need these arrange and pay for them.

A training module with a fee attached. Usually framed as a formality, and usually with a deadline.

A deposit to secure the role, for accommodation, for visa processing, for the placement itself.

Each one is the same transaction wearing different clothes: money moves from you toward them before any work has been done. In the UK that is the line quoted above, and it does not become legal because the request is polite or the invoice looks professional.

There is a second pattern worth naming, where the money moves the other way. You are "hired", funds arrive in your account, and your first task is to forward them somewhere, minus your cut. That is not a job. It is money laundering being run through your bank account, and the person whose account is used is the one the bank and the police can see.

Where to report it, and why it is worth doing

Two routes, both free.

The police fraud reporting service, which is where employment fraud goes on the record. Reporting does not usually get your money back, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What it does is put the advert, the domain and the bank details into a dataset that other reports get matched against.

JobsAware, which describes itself as providing "free help and advice to workers who may have suffered from scams, mis-treatment or unfair working practices". It is the UK's dedicated route for this, and it covers the adjacent cases too, including not being paid and being treated unfairly, which is where a lot of people actually land.

Also worth knowing: the Fair Work Agency now sits behind the agency rules, so there is an enforcement body attached to the line rather than just a rule in a document.

The part nobody can tell you, because no rule exists

Here is what the law does not do, and it matters for the thing most people are actually asking.

There is no UK rule about how long a job advert may stay up. I went looking for one across the government's guidance and the fraud services and found nothing. There is no maximum, no required expiry, no obligation to take down a filled role.

And a posting for a job that is not really open is not, in itself, an offense. Fraud is an offense. Charging a work-seeker is a breach. A company advertising a role it has no intention of filling this quarter, collecting CVs against a possible headcount approval, is doing something else entirely: something legal, common, and completely invisible from the advert.

That is the gap between the two problems. The legal line catches the scams. It does nothing about the far larger category of postings that are real listings for unreal openings, which I wrote about in the field guide to ghost jobs.

So what do you actually do

For scams, use the line. Money moving from you toward an employer or agency, in any costume, before any work exists, is the tell. It is not a judgment call about whether an advert feels off.

For everything else, the question is not "is this legal" but "is this live". Nobody is obliged to tell you when a role was filled, reposted for the fourth time, or listed by three agencies who all want the same fee from the same employer. The signals that answer that question are visible on the listing itself, if you know what to look at: how old it is, how often it has been reposted, whether the salary is stated, whether the company's own careers page carries it.

That is the part JobIntel scores for you, and it is a different job from spotting a fraud. One is a line somebody crossed. The other is an evening you will not get back.

Don't apply blind. It's your turn to do the screening.

Sources, read 22 September 2026: the government's overview of the Conduct Regulations 2003, updated 22 June 2026, for the Section 6(1) prohibition; the UK police fraud reporting service's A to Z of fraud for the definition of employment fraud; and JobsAware's own description of what it does.