Today is World’s Consumer Rights Day, and because of that the Shanghai Labor and Social Security published a list of the top-10 most common employment scams. Some could have happened in Europe as well, such as that the job is very different from the job description that was advertised. But others you would not often encounter there, a few examples:

– If you want to get a job at a certain company, you first need to do a paid training course. The company, or at least the recruiter, earns money from this.

– You have to submit a sample of your design work when applying for a job. These works are often used commercially, even if the applicant was not offered a job.

– When applying for a sales job, you have to buy the products that you need to sell. I remember a story where it turned out that the price is much higher than the real market price, and the sales jobs were actually fake.

– Everybody is fired right after the probation period, because workers in China earn less during the first months on the job. Of course you can get re-hired, but only at the lower probation period salary.

The main problem is that there are too many people looking for jobs in this city, and therefore there is a lot of competition to get a job. Each year there is a huge amount of university graduates that cannot find jobs and there is a steady flow of migrant workers arriving in the city. Often these groups are quite naive. Migrant workers because they are new in a big city, and students because they have not encountered the problems of real life yet. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs know that these groups easily fall for these traps, and use it to earn money.