内容概览
Recruitment fraud works by impersonating real agencies, and it is a real risk to job seekers across Asia Pacific. The checks that settle it take about a minute: confirm the licence, confirm the email domain, and apply the one rule that no legitimate employment agency breaks — you are never asked to pay to get a job. If something does not pass those checks, report it, to us and to the authority in your market.
What is the one rule?
RecruitFirst never charges job seekers a fee. Not a registration fee, not a placement fee, not a deposit, not a training fee, not a visa processing fee, not a "refundable" anything. Our fees are paid by the hiring employer.
Any request for money in connection with a RecruitFirst role is fraudulent, regardless of how convincing the rest of it looks.
How do I check the licence?
Employment agencies are licensed in most markets in the region, and the licence number is published on our site rather than supplied on request: Singapore EA Licence 13C6342 and Hong Kong Licence No. 83702. They appear in the footer of every page.
Check the number against the register published by the market's authority — the Ministry of Manpower in Singapore, the Labour Department in Hong Kong. A licence number that appears in a message but not on the register is the clearest signal there is.
What about the email address and the link?
Check the domain, character by character. Our consultants write from addresses at recruitfirst.co, and each office has its own regional address listed on the contact page. Fraudulent messages typically use a free email service, or a domain that differs by one character, or a display name that looks right while the underlying address does not.
Two more checks worth doing:
- **Where does the link actually go?** Hover before clicking. Our job pages live on this site.
- **Which office, which consultant?** A real consultant will tell you their name, their office and the client's identity before asking you for anything.
What are the common patterns?
The recurring ones in this region are worth recognising.
- A "job offer" arriving with no application, no interview and no conversation.
- Interviews conducted entirely through a messaging app, with no video and no call.
- A request for identity documents, bank details or a copy of your passport early, before any real process.
- Pressure and a deadline — an offer that expires today.
- Any payment, for any reason, framed as a fee, a deposit, a training cost or a currency conversion.
What should I do if I am contacted?
Do not pay, and do not send identity documents or bank details. Keep the message. Then report it in both directions.
- **To us**, through the contact form, choosing the scam report category. It goes to a real person, and it helps us have fraudulent listings taken down.
- **To the authority in your market**, and to the police where money has changed hands. Each market has its own reporting route, and the fraud is a criminal matter rather than just a nuisance.
If you have already paid, report it to your bank immediately as well — speed matters more than certainty at that point.
What if you are not sure?
Ask us before you act. Send the message you received through the contact form and we will tell you whether it came from us. Nobody at RecruitFirst will be annoyed at being asked to prove who they are — that is the correct instinct, and we would rather answer it a hundred times than have one person defrauded in our name.