What Actually Happens If You Sign Up for One of Those Scammy "Online Jobs" Is Pretty Fascinating

Have you been getting unprompted text messages promising "high-paying jobs" or "easy money" for what sounds like suspiciously little work?

If so, you're not alone. Job scam texts have proliferated over the past few years, thanks to increasingly sophisticated robotexting tech, lagging regulatory responses, and a cryptocurrency industry run amok.

While the levelheaded among us tend to ignore or block these messages, one enterprising journalist decided to go down the rabbit hole and sign up with one of the scammers promising easy money for an online job — and what he found there drew the curtain back, at least a bit, on a seedy underbelly of the internet that takes advantage of the credulous and desperate.

As Alexander Sammon writes for Slate, things "got weirder than I could have imagined