If you own a cellphone, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten The Text: a random recruiter, sending a friendly message with an incredible job opportunity to make a lot of money for just a little bit of work. If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. It’s an employment scam.

If it feels like you’re being inundated with these spam texts right now, you aren’t imagining things. There’s been a huge spike in these scams since 2020, and that’s because they work. Being scammed can feel really embarrassing, but you should know that if it’s happened to you, you aren’t alone. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received nearly 250,000 reports of text scams. And Americans lost about $500 million to them.

On the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, we discu

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