Reports of “task scams” — fake online jobs that drip-feed tiny payouts before demanding a deposit — quadrupled to roughly 20,000 in the first half of 2024, against 5,000 in all of 2023, with job-scam losses topping $220 million in six months. India’s regulators see the same wave: AICTE has formally warned students about forged offer letters sent in its own name. The fix is the same discipline that gets you hired — verify proof before you trust the claim.
Key takeaways
- Job-scam reports are surging: task-scam complaints quadrupled in a year and accounted for almost 40% of 2024 job-scam reports to the FTC.
- India is squarely in the blast radius — AICTE warned of fake appointment letters from lookalike domains, and IIT Roorkee publicly disowned a third party selling “IIT internships.”
- The two loudest red flags: money flowing from you to them, and an offer letter that arrives before any real interview.
- Even “free” fake internships have a cost — NACE data shows unpaid interns average 0.94 job offers versus 1.61 for paid interns, and a certificate is not proof of work.
The scam wave is real, and it targets students first
The FTC’s December 2024 data spotlight reads like a growth chart a founder would envy: crypto-denominated job-scam losses hit about $41 million in the first half of 2024, double all of 2023. Scammers go where the anxiety is, and nobody is more anxious than a second-year student watching seniors fight for placements. In February 2025, AICTE alerted every technical institution in the country that fake job appointment letters were being issued in the name of AICTE and Ministry of Education officers, from counterfeit email addresses built to look official. AICTE communicates only through its own domain — anything else is noise or fraud.
It reaches inside campus gates too. In March 2026, IIT Roorkee publicly warned students against an outfit called Launched Global that was selling internship and training programmes while falsely claiming an association with the institute. The institute’s statement was blunt: it does not authorise any third party to offer internships on its behalf. If an IIT has to say that out loud, assume the brochure in your DMs deserves scrutiny.
Red flag #1: money flows in the wrong direction
A real internship pays you. Internshala’s annual trends report puts India’s average stipend at ₹8,000 a month, with top offers touching ₹1 lakh — and internship listings grew 25% year over year, so scarcity is not a reason to pay for access. The moment an “internship” asks for a registration fee, a security deposit, a laptop-unlock charge or a ₹30,000 “masterclass” with guaranteed placement, you are no longer a candidate; you are the customer. The gamified task scams in the FTC data run the same play at speed: small payouts to build trust, then a demand that you top up your account to “unlock” earnings you will never see.
Red flag #2: the offer arrives before the interview
Real employers evaluate before they commit — that is the entire point of hiring. An offer letter that lands after zero interviews, a five-minute WhatsApp chat or an “aptitude test” that everyone passes is a prop, not a decision. The forged letters AICTE flagged worked precisely because they skipped the friction: official-looking PDF, urgent deadline, a fee to confirm your seat. Slow the transaction down. Ask who you would report to, what you would build in week one, and how the work gets reviewed. Scammers cannot answer scoping questions because there is no work behind the letter.
Red flag #3: the deliverable is a certificate, not work
Some “internships” are technically not scams — you pay nothing, they steal nothing — but they still take the one asset you cannot replace: a semester of building time. If the entire output is a PDF certificate and a LinkedIn badge, the market will price it at zero. NACE’s student survey found paid interns averaged 1.61 job offers against 0.94 for unpaid interns, and the paid group’s median starting salary was $62,500 versus $42,500. Pay is not just money — it is evidence the employer valued the work enough to budget for it. Certificates are claims; commits, pull requests and a deployed URL are proof.
The 10-minute verification checklist
Run every offer through this before you reply. It takes ten minutes and catches almost everything above:
- Check the email domain. Offers come from the company’s real domain, not Gmail, not a lookalike with an extra letter. AICTE’s forged letters lived and died on this one check.
- Find the humans. Look up the founder and the person who contacted you on LinkedIn. No team page, no employees, no history — no internship.
- Search “company name + scam”. Students post warnings fast; two minutes of searching surfaces most repeat offenders.
- Refuse to pay, full stop. Registration fees, deposits, paid training with “guaranteed placement” — all disqualifying, no exceptions.
- Ask for scope. Request the first two weeks of work in writing: what you will build, who reviews it, what stack. Real teams answer easily; fake ones vanish.
- Benchmark the stipend. The national average is ₹8,000 a month; a stranger offering ₹50,000 for “simple daily tasks” is running the FTC’s task-scam script on you.
- Verify institutional claims at the source. “Partnered with IIT/AICTE” is checkable in one search on the institution’s official site — IIT Roorkee’s public denial shows exactly why.
Verification is the whole game — on both sides
Notice the symmetry: employers now drown in AI-written résumés and have to verify candidates through commits and contest ratings, and students drown in fake offers and have to verify employers through domains and scoped work. Tierones exists to do that verification for both sides — students prove identity with a college .ac.in email and link real GitHub history, and every internship posted goes through review before students ever see it, so the listings you browse have already survived the checklist above. If you are building toward your first real internship, start with the second-year proof-of-work playbook and see how we score signal at tierones.io/tier-rank.
FAQ
How can I tell if an internship offer is fake?
Check three things first: did money flow in the wrong direction, did the offer arrive before any real interview, and did the email come from an official company domain? AICTE has warned that fraudsters send forged appointment letters from lookalike addresses, so verify every offer through the organisation’s official website before responding.
Should I ever pay for an internship or a guaranteed placement?
No. A real internship pays you — Internshala’s trends report puts India’s average stipend at ₹8,000 a month. Anything charging a registration fee, training deposit or “guaranteed placement” bootcamp fee is selling you a course, not offering you work.
Are unpaid certificate internships worth doing for the certificate?
Rarely. NACE data shows paid interns averaged 1.61 job offers against 0.94 for unpaid interns, and certificates carry almost no hiring signal on their own. Employers read commits, deployed projects and code you can defend — if an internship produces none of those, it is spending time your real proof of work needs.
Verified 2nd-year developer at an IIT, NIT or IIIT? Skip the scam minefield — request an invite with your .ac.in email and GitHub, and apply only to internships that have already been verified.