How to Spot a Job Scam in the Netherlands: One EU Rule Does Most of the Work

If you are job hunting in the Netherlands, most advice about spotting scams is a list of feelings: the email looked odd, the pay seemed too good, the recruiter was pushy. Feelings are a poor test, because a competent scam is designed to feel fine.

There is a better test, and it is written into European law.

The rule

Directive 2008/104/EC, on temporary agency work, says it plainly: "Temporary-work agencies shall not charge workers any fees in exchange for arranging for them to be recruited by a user undertaking, or for concluding a contract of employment or an employment relationship with a user undertaking after carrying out an assignment in that undertaking."

Read that twice, because it covers both halves of the trick. An agency may not charge you to place you. And it may not charge you afterward, once the company you were placed with takes you on directly.

That is EU-wide. Each member state implements it in its own law, and in the Netherlands the instrument covering intermediaries is the Waadi, the Workers Allocation by Intermediaries Act, which the Dutch government describes as addressing illegal labor, sham constructions, excessive working hours and underpayment.

So the test is not "does this feel legitimate". It is "is money moving from me to them". If it is, you are not being recruited. You are being sold something, by someone who is not allowed to sell it.

The check that takes under a minute

Here is the part most scam advice misses, and it is specific to the Netherlands.

Every intermediary supplying staff here has to be on a public register. In the Dutch government's own words: "All intermediaries that supply personnel in the Netherlands must be registered in the KVK Business Register. This registration must state that they supply workers. This is the Waadi registration requirement." The Netherlands Labour Authority checks compliance, and the Chamber of Commerce publishes a Waadi check so anyone can look an intermediary up.

That turns a judgment call into a lookup. Before you send a passport scan or a bank detail to an "agency", search the register for it. A real staffing agency is registered, because it must be. An agency that does not appear, while claiming to place people into Dutch jobs, has told you something factual about itself.

This is a better first move than studying the email for typos, and it works the same whether the advert reached you in English or in Dutch.

What the regulator actually says is going on

The Netherlands Labour Authority, which sits under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, does not describe the problem as a few fake emails. Its own framing: "There are employment agencies in the Netherlands that are still disregarding the correct regulations. A great deal of misery is caused by situations involving, for example, exploitation, underpayment and unfair competition."

That is worth holding onto, because it reframes the risk. The dangerous case for an international worker here is not only the outright fake vacancy that takes 500 euros and disappears. It is the real placement with a real intermediary that underpays you, houses you badly, or treats your visa status as leverage. The fee rule and the register are the cheap early checks against both.

Where the law stops, and it stops sooner than people expect

I went looking for a Dutch rule about job adverts themselves: how long one may stay up, or whether advertising a role nobody intends to fill is an offense. I could not find one, on the government's own portals or the regulator's.

That is not a gap in my research so much as a finding about the law. Fraud is prosecuted as fraud. Charging a work-seeker breaches the agency rules. But an advert for a job that is not really open, left up for months, collecting applications into a folder, sits outside all of it.

Which means the thing you are most likely to encounter is the thing no regulator will help you with. That is the same conclusion I reached looking at the UK's rules on fake job ads, and at the American version in the field guide to ghost jobs. Three legal systems, same hole.

So what do you do with a listing

For scams, use the two checks above: money direction, and the register. They are fast and they are factual.

For everything else, you are judging whether a listing is live, which no rule will tell you. The signals are on the posting itself. How old is it. Has the same role been reposted every few weeks. Does it state a salary, which Dutch listings often do not. Does the company's own careers page carry it. Is the same job appearing through four intermediaries at once, which usually means several agencies working the same client rather than four opportunities.

That last one matters more here than in most markets, because so much Dutch hiring runs through intermediaries. Four listings can be one job.

Dutch vacancies reach this site through EURES, the European public employment network covering 31 EU and EEA countries, alongside the general aggregators. Worth knowing regardless of which tool you use: EURES is public, free, and the one network that does not belong to anybody trying to sell you a placement.

One practical note if you are job hunting here in English. Searching in English does not have to mean seeing only the English-language postings. Our own search runs both ways, so an English job title also looks for the Dutch or German equivalent, which matters in a market where plenty of real vacancies are never written in English at all. Whatever you use, check that it does this, because otherwise a quiet search result is telling you about the tool rather than the market.

JobIntel scores those signals for you and merges the duplicates, which is a different job from the one the law does. The law catches the people taking your money. Nothing catches the evening you spend on a role that was filled in July, except reading the listing properly before you start.

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

Sources, read 22 September 2026: Directive 2008/104/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on temporary agency work, Article 6(3), via EUR-Lex; Business.gov.nl, published by the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce, on the Waadi registration requirement and the Waadi check; and the Netherlands Labour Authority on fraudulent employment agencies. No scam statistics appear here: the Dutch figures in circulation come from a fraud helpline's own report count, and I could not verify them at source.