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"Recruitment-to-training" is a criminal fraud committed under the guise of recruitment and training. In reality, criminals use various seemingly legal forms to cover up illegal purposes, which is highly concealed and causes great harm to society. Special judicial interpretations should be issued to restrict such behavior, strengthen the review obligations of recruitment platforms, establish an information sharing and joint law enforcement mechanism, increase the cost of violating the law, and establish an industry blacklist.
"The interviewer took my resume and reviewed it from beginning to end, saying that I was incompetent and had low professionalism. But then he changed the subject and said, 'But it doesn't matter, I can give you a chance.'"
Recalling that interview, Li Yuan (pseudonym) still feels ridiculous. "I really thought I had met a noble person and was willing to train me." Four months later, he found that he had taken out a loan of nearly 30,000 yuan, and the "sentimental" company had already changed its name and continued to "cast its net" on the recruitment platform.
No coincidence. Not long ago, Beijing exposed seven typical cases of illegal activities to clean up and rectify the order of the human resources market. One of the cases showed that a Beijing technology company failed to perform verification and registration obligations for the recruitment service accounts that published recruitment information on its video platform, resulting in a large number of suspected false recruitment information on the platform such as "paid internal referrals" and "guaranteed direct signing". Relevant departments, in accordance with the "Online Recruitment Service Management Regulations" and the E-Commerce Law of the People's Republic of China, ordered the unit to make rectifications, delete illegal information, freeze accounts, and improve the platform's recruitment information access standards and review mechanisms.
The failure of platform review just provides a convenient entrance for the black industry chain of "recruitment, transfer and training". A group of fresh graduates such as Li Yuan and Zhang Jin (pseudonym) were accurately targeted through seemingly formal platforms and fell into carefully designed traps step by step.
Recruitment is the "bait" and training loans are the "hook"
Zhang Jin submitted her resume after registering on a recruitment platform. That afternoon, he received a call from an information technology company in Nanjing. The other party accurately reported his name, phone number and school, and claimed to have seen his resume on the recruitment platform.
"I thought it was quite formal at the time, so I went for the interview." Zhang Jin recalled. The interview process seems to be standardized. You need to fill in the application registration form, conduct self-introduction, project inquiries, and computer code testing. However, after the test, the interviewer's attitude suddenly changed.
"He said that I was not capable enough to do development directly, but I could participate in four months of pre-job training. After the training, I could be assigned to work in more than 200 cooperative companies. The minimum salary is 6,000 yuan for undergraduates and 7,000 yuan for graduate students. If I don't meet the promise, I will get a full refund." Zhang Jin said that the fee model sounds very "humane" because there is no direct charge, but it is paid out of future wages. "I thought it was quite cost-effective to learn something and have a job."
This sounds like "paid training", but it actually hides financial traps. Company staff checked Zhang Jin’s WeChat and Alipay credit scores, asked him to take photos holding his ID card, and signed three contracts.
The essence of "recruitment-to-training" is a criminal fraud committed under the guise of recruitment and training. In reality, criminals use various legal forms to cover up illegal purposes, which are highly concealed and deceptive and cause great harm to society.
"They only paid 350 yuan per month for the first six months, and 1,900 yuan per month for the next 18 months, a total of 24 installments. They also said that the minimum salary was 6,000 yuan, and there was no pressure to repay. They didn't say it was a loan from a third-party financial institution. They didn't mention interest, and overdue payments would affect their credit. They just asked them to sign an installment agreement. Many people didn't even realize they had taken out a training loan after signing," Zhang Jin said.
Even more alarming is the way companies obtain information about job applicants. Zhang Jin told reporters: "This organization keeps changing its name and address, and registers many shell companies, but each one has the same phone number and email address, and the invoices are issued by the same person. They also place advertisements on many platforms. As long as someone submits a resume, they will contact them by phone."
Li Yuan also encountered similar routines when applying for jobs online. "They said it doesn't matter if they don't have the ability. The unit has three months of training. We understood it as 'pre-job training,' but they were very vague about it." Li Yuan said that regarding the expenses, their rhetoric was "this money is for the hard work of the old employees."
The promise shrinks, but if you breach the contract, you will lose money.
Zhang Jin soon discovered that the so-called "free accommodation" was the landlord's contact information provided by the company, and the rent was deducted from the "living allowance", which was a loan product with an annual interest rate of about 20%. Job seekers were actually in a "housing loan" state, and the so-called "more than 200 cooperative enterprises" were purely fictional.
"About 20 days after joining the company, the company asked us to sign a 'training registration form' and erase all previous recruitment interview records. If we refused, we were threatened with a liquidated damages of 5,000 yuan." Zhang Jin said that for job seekers who saw through the scam and tried to leave, the company accused them of being "black accounts with bank card problems" or "technical secondary school students unable to find jobs," blaming all the problems on the job seekers themselves.
In the fourth month, the company directly demanded payment of fees and denied all previous oral and written commitments. The terms of the contract are extremely harsh: you can retake the course if you pass the exam with a score of 80 or above, and you can only get a refund if you can't find a job after retaking the course. "It is basically impossible to trigger a refund." Zhang Jin said that the contract also states that "after the training, all trainees need to cancel the accounts they used to find jobs and use new accounts when looking for jobs." The tuition agreement also states that "regardless of whether they are employed in the future, tuition fees must be paid in full on time. If payment is interrupted, the headquarters will file a lawsuit in accordance with the law."
"Many newly graduated college students don't know what to do when encountering this kind of thing, and they dare not tell their families, so they can only suffer the consequences." Li Yuan said.
Relevant departments remind job seekers that if they encounter situations where they pay for training or purchase courses before they can join the job, they should be vigilant, immediately stop contact with relevant units or individuals, and resolutely refuse to make payments or loans to avoid property losses; they should also keep chat records, written materials and other evidence in a timely manner and report it to relevant departments such as the public security, human resources and social security departments in a timely manner.
Under strict supervision and inspection, black job agencies "change their vests"
From April to July this year, the State Council’s Leading Group for Employment Promotion and Labor Protection deployed a special campaign to clean up and rectify the order of the human resources market across the country, focusing on cracking down on “recruitment-to-training (loan)” fraud, focusing on cracking down on the phenomenon of luring job seekers to participate in paid training in the name of recruitment, and cleaning up false recruitment information such as “internal recommendation by central state-owned enterprises” and “guaranteed direct signing”. During the special operation, a media technology company in Beijing deceived more than 1,200 job seekers with the rhetoric of "high salary, zero threshold", involving more than 19.5 million yuan. The case was investigated and the main culprit was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. The recently exposed cases of platform review failures have pointed the regulatory finger at the “source” of false recruitment information—online platforms.
However, under high pressure, routines have not disappeared, but are constantly "evolving".
Yang Dong, a lawyer at Beijing Jincheng Tongda (Shanghai) Law Firm, pointed out that illegal organizations are packaging "training fees" into "employment service fees" and "job reservation funds", switching from traditional recruitment websites to short video platforms, WeChat groups and other channels with weaker supervision, registering shell companies to commit crimes in turn, and even purchasing false company materials to pretend to be regular companies to publish recruitment information.
Yang Dong pointed out that "recruitment-to-training (loan)" is a crime of fraud that attempts to cover up illegal purposes in a legal form, and is consistent with the crime of fraud or contract fraud in the criminal law. However, in judicial practice, victims face multiple obstacles in safeguarding their rights: First, there is insufficient evidence. This type of fraud is mostly oral communication and lacks written evidence. It is easy for institutions to argue that "the training is voluntary registration." Second, it is difficult to file a case. There is usually a written contract between the two parties, and the public security organs may regard it as a "civil dispute" and refuse to intervene. Third, civil litigation is long and costly, and many victims are forced to give up. Fourth, it is difficult to prove criminal liability.
Yang Dong said that special judicial interpretations should be issued to restrict such behavior, strengthen the review obligations of recruitment platforms, establish information sharing and joint law enforcement mechanisms for human resources and social security, public security, market supervision, financial supervision and other departments, while increasing the cost of violating the law and establishing an industry blacklist.
Reporter Wang Xianru Our intern Li Yanyi
"Worker Daily" (September 28, 2026, Page 06)
