Data Annotation Part-Time Advance Fee Scam: Luring job seekers with high-paying annotation roles, collecting training fees and deposits, and then refusing to assign tasks

Who Gets Targeted

Victims are primarily stay-at-home mothers, unemployed youth, and college students looking for side hustles to increase their income. They generally lack industry awareness and are extremely susceptible to recruitment ads promising zero-threshold monthly earnings exceeding 10,000 yuan. Their psychological weaknesses lie in their eagerness to cash in and ease financial pressure, an information gap regarding emerging technologies, and unrealistic fantasies of high pay. When the other party demands a deposit or the purchase of pre-job training courses to receive tasks, they often make blind payments driven by job-hunting anxiety and sunk cost fallacy, ultimately falling into a chain of traps.

骗局怎么运作

• Bait and Traffic Generation: Shady intermediaries batch-post part-time job listings on major recruitment platforms and social communities, deliberately promoting schedule flexibility, zero entry requirements, and daily earnings ranging from one hundred to several hundred yuan. They exploit the large model trend and technological halo to target side-hustle seekers eager to cash in, which is the starting point of the funnel.
• Brainwashing via Scripts: Once job seekers take the bait, customer service or recruiters send forged screenshots of annotation interfaces and team profit records via private chats, claiming that high-level task volume is currently massive, but beginners cannot handle tasks directly without systematic training, otherwise it will drag down the overall project delivery quality, thereby instilling anxiety.
• Relocating the Venue: Job seekers are guided away from formal recruitment platforms to add private WeChat accounts or download obscure voice chat software for interviews. Deep brainwashing takes place in a closed information environment, followed by the core trap—demanding the payment of hundreds to thousands of yuan in pre-job training fees, software fees, or confidentiality deposits.
• Manufacturing Barriers: After receiving the fees, the perpetrators send poorly made video tutorials for victims to self-study and arrange qualification exams with extremely high difficulty or near-impossible passing rates. Even if the exam is passed, the actual tasks assigned are extremely few and the unit price is extremely low, intentionally creating disqualification excuses to deduct funds or simply stopping task assignments altogether.
• Refusing Refunds and Disappearing: When victims realize they cannot earn the hyped high pay and demand a refund, the perpetrators often refuse on the grounds that training services have already been provided or contracts breached, and may even block them and go dark. Some syndicates instead promote higher-priced alternative courses for a secondary harvest, completely squeezing out the remaining value of the job seekers.

红旗信号（看到这些快跑）

• 🚩 Upfront Fee Requirements: If a data annotation part-time job requires payment of any kind—such as deposits, training fees, software activation fees, etc.—before task assignment or onboarding, this is a typical illegal recruitment behavior, and contact should be broken immediately.
• 🚩 Avoiding Platform Control: The recruiter refuses to communicate through formal recruitment platforms and strongly insists on adding private WeChat accounts or downloading specific voice software for interviews and coordination, indicating an intention to evade supervision and evidence collection by legitimate platforms.
• 🚩 Exaggerated Earnings Promises: Postings claim zero-basis daily earnings of hundreds or monthly earnings over 10,000 yuan with complete schedule flexibility, far exceeding market annotation unit prices, while lacking clear sources of large model projects and entity company information.
• 🚩 Deliberately Obstacles in Exams: Setting vague or extremely harsh standards during assessments to deliberately manufacture false failures in order to deduct principal amounts; actual task allocation is minimal and settlement cycles are severely delayed, vastly contradicting the promotional claims.
• 🚩 Vague Company Credentials: Failing to state the true full company entity name on recruitment pages, or using shell companies without human resource service license filings. Investigations often reveal frequent labor disputes or legal cases.

真实案例

• In 2023, local police dismantled a fraud syndicate consisting of over a hundred members. Operating under the guise of online part-time recruitment for data annotators, the syndicate induced job seekers to pay hundreds to thousands of yuan in training fees, defrauding over 25 million yuan in total. The mastermind was ultimately sentenced for fraud, revealing the operational logic of fake jobs masking true theft.
• In April 2026, according to an investigative report by Sina Tech, 'recruitment-to-training' traps emerged on recruitment platforms. Job seekers were lured into paying 2,000 yuan in tuition fees to learn generative courses, with the promise that they could subsequently earn 100,000 yuan in income through part-time orders. Ultimately, they found it impossible to monetize, and the other party refused to refund the tuition on the grounds that the courses had already been activated.
• In March 2026, according to an investigative report by Beijing Daily, multiple victims spent nearly 10,000 yuan purchasing so-called automated live-streaming e-commerce training courses in pursuit of part-time earnings, only to earn a mere hundred yuan in commissions during actual operations. The agency attracted sign-ups by exaggerating earnings, which was identified as a typical false part-time inducement training disorder.

Official Stance

• On June 9, 2026, the official website of the Human Resources and Social Security Department of Liaoning Province forwarded a risk notice jointly issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Public Security, and the National Financial Regulatory Administration. It explicitly reminded job seekers to guard against traps using high-paying part-time jobs as an excuse to induce high training fee payments or training loans.
• On July 23, 2025, according to Tencent News, police and human resources departments across multiple regions alerted job seekers to watch out for fake job scams that offer data annotation or live-streaming e-commerce roles while actually pushing high-priced training courses or extracting training fees, calling on formal platforms to strengthen audits.
• On July 3, 2026, according to Tencent News, public security organs dismantled a large-scale fraud syndicate that used online part-time recruitment to induce victims into paying training fees. Over two hundred people were arrested for suspected fraud, once again confirming the official high-pressure crackdown on such black-market industries.

How to Protect Yourself

• ✅ Refuse Any Upfront Fees: Anyone demanding payment before onboarding or task assignment—regardless of whether it is called a training fee, deposit, software fee, or confidentiality fee—should immediately terminate communication and report the enterprise's violations directly to the recruitment platform.
• ✅ Strictly Verify Enterprise Credentials: During communication, require the other party to provide the full legal business license name, and check its survival status and human resource service qualifications on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System or Qichacha, focusing on administrative penalties and abnormal business records. Do not easily trust temporary studios without physical registration information.
• ✅ Adhere to Platform Transaction Closed Loops: Never add private WeChat accounts or download unknown communication software for communication. All job hunting and interview steps must be completed within formal recruitment platforms to ensure chat logs, voice evidence, and key promises are retained and accessible by the platform.
• ✅ Beware of High Pay and Technological Gimmicks: Establish objective and rational part-time expectations, understand that the true market unit price for data annotation is very low and belongs to piece-rate intensive labor, maintain extreme vigilance against posters claiming zero-basis high pay and effortless wealth, and never blindly follow so-called technological trends.