It’s not only seniors who are the targets of fraudsters attempting to obtain personal information for use in theft; young jobseekers are increasingly victimized, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Scammers post ads for fake jobs or send emails that look as if they are from someone known to the intended target, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned last month.  Once the recipients apply, they may be asked to supply enough personal or banking information to have their identity or bank information stolen.

“It’s something we’ve been seeing a lot more over the past year,” said Kati Daffan, assistant director of the FTC’s division that monitors schemes, tin an interview with the Journal. 

Younger people, such as students and recent graduates, may be more vulnerable to scammers because of their comfort conducting so much of their lives online and their relative inexperience in the job market, according to watchdog-agency officials and career counselors interviewed by the Journal.

“They’re so thrilled that somebody reached out to them that maybe they’re not as guarded to double check to see if this is a real person,” said Beth Hendler-Grunt, president of Next Great Step, a career-coaching firm, in an interview with the Journal.

Big recruiting and staffing firms, including Robert Half and Kelly, have issued alerts about fake job advertisements, spokespeople told the Journal. Job sites such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn have updated their fraud-detection efforts in response to job scammers using job boards and networking sites such as theirs. LinkedIn recently launched a verification feature for recruiters, so that job seekers can see a badge on their profiles to signal it is an authenticated corporate subscription.

Job seekers should be wary of texts or emails that ask them to do an interview in an app that they need to download, such as Signal or WhatsApp, or of requests to conduct interviews only by text, email or online chat, said Teresa Murray, consumer-watchdog director at U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy organization, in an interview with the Journal. Any question about personal information or bank-account numbers, and promises to send a check to cover work-from-home equipment are red flags, she said.

“Younger folks may not know what’s a normal request and what smells fishy,” she said.

Elon University senior Maggie Braswell eventually got suspicious after receiving an email offering an internship as a digital-marketing and customer-relationship manager that she hadn’t applied for. She downloaded a messaging app called Session for a briefing on the role and training and thought she was texting with the recruiting team. Eventually, she was told she would have to supply her banking information to receive her first paycheck.

She consulted her parents, who raised concerns and made calls to the company to help her figure out that the people claiming to work for them were fake. “I was, like, OK, I’m being catfished,” she told the Journal. “Thank God, I didn’t give them any of my bank information.”