Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

LAST WEEK, A text landed on my phone. “Join the TikTok Marketing Partners Team — Remote Part-Time Opportunities!” it read, offering $850 a day for “only 60-90 minutes per day.” A few weeks before that, another one: “Do you still need work?” And then there was the note from Daisy at Warner Bros., promising a minimum daily pay of $200 for just 30 to 60 minutes of work (a great offer, but not as good as the one from Poshia at Randstad, who was offering $6,000 per day!).

Alas, as you might’ve guessed, none of these were real. And there’s a good chance many of us have received similar texts. A new study from credit reporting agency Equifax Canada found that a third of all Canadians  reported getting these scammy recruitment texts; 13 per cent said they had clicked the link, and six per cent had their identity stolen.

“We can’t treat scams as background noise anymore,” said Julie Kuzmic, head of consumer advocacy and compliance at Equifax. “The threat of fraud is happening in real time on our phones, in our inboxes. Canadians are telling us these threats feel constant and personal, and too many are left wondering what to do when they’re targeted.”

These kinds of text scams have been on the rise across the world. According to the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S., reported losses to job scams tripled between 2020 and 2023. They also come at a moment of high unemployment — and high demand for remote work.

“Often the job will have an easy interview or no interview, promise to let you work from home and let you start right away,” Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Centre, told NBC News.

It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I’d never fall for that!’ But imagine you’re a jobseeker in your ninth month of job-hunting. Do you think you’d be as quick to write it off?

Equifax Canada issued the report as a reminder of sorts not to click any of these links, and to report anything that looks suspicious — basic online security stuff.

Or, you could do what Alexander Sammon did this summer and follow up as far as the scam will take you and write about it for Slate Magazine. “In the annals of what seems to be one of the lowest-effort scams currently running rampant across America, this felt like an especially low-effort attempt,” he wrote in a piece very much worth reading. “So began a saga that went deeper — and got much weirder — than I ever imagined.” Alas, the job turned out to be as scammy as assumed, and the writer lost out on $96.

It seems these scams aren’t going anywhere, unfortunately. “Fraud today is deeply personal. It’s arriving by text, email or social media in ways that feel familiar and authentic,” noted Kuzmic. “That’s a fear we need to address head-on with the right tools and solutions to protect ourselves and our families.”

CULTURE

Grooving things into existence

Welcome to the age of vibe working, where desks no longer define our work, and rhythm becomes the new routine

IN THE AGE of AI, many are wondering what the future of work is. The answer? It’s vibe working, bro. Duh.

No joke. ‘Vibe working’ is becoming a real and prominent way of working in the professional world. You might’ve heard of ‘vibe coding’ — computer coding using an AI tool to write the code that produces the product the user envisions, with the main advantage being you don’t need to learn to code. Well, it’s now moving beyond coding.

In September, Microsoft rolled out its vibe working suite of tools in Excel and Microsoft Word. “In the same way that vibe coding has transformed software development, the latest reasoning models in Copilot unlock agentic productivity for Office artifacts,” they wrote.

In short, you create through prompting. Writers need not write, coders need not code, illustrators need not illustrate. Let the clanker handle the hard stuff, you worry about the overall vibe.

“More of the corporate world is vibing,” wrote Amanda Hoover at Business Insider. There are Chief Vibes Officers, and the term has become a common corporate shorthand for using generative AI to do the tedious and strenuous parts of a project. “It also conveys the idea that work is free flowing, improvised and easy,” Hoover added.

While this risks generating some ‘workslop,’ don’t be too quick to dismiss it — the ability to vibe work is probably one of the first real transformative effects of AI on the way people work. Vibe working is becoming a marketable skill like any other, one that might most resemble the work of an editor. “I came to see that the most productive form of AI-assisted coding may be an editorial one,” wrote The Verge’s Sheon Han. “A vibe coder — a responsible one, that is — must assume a kind of editorship. Through a volley of prompts — like successive rounds of edits — the editor-coder minimized the delta between their vision and the output.”

In the end, it’s still work, and it’s not always easy. “I imagine to this particular demographic of people, that’s very appealing: work being about vibing more than it's about analyzing or synthesizing or reporting, which I don't think sounds particularly artistic or creative or collaborative or beautiful,” said Carnegie Mellon University’s Emily DeJeu.

So, while it may be different, that shouldn’t be confused with it being easy or less valuable. “Labour is labour,” summed up DeJeu, “and the labour to build expertise is laborious.”

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

What makes a work commute less stressful? A car, it seems

New research has uncovered a direct link between employee mental health and the ways people commute

IF YOU HAVE an already busy schedule, is it better to commute by car, or to take an alternative ‘active transportation’ method like walking, taking transit or biking?

New research from the Université de Montréal came to a somewhat surprising conclusion on that question, finding that those taking active transportation were more stressed, and were experiencing higher levels of work-life conflict — possibly flipping the script on some of the benefits we hear touted on active commuting.

The explanation comes down to time. Since the study looked primarily at Canadian employees, active commutes could be challenging logistically and cover long distances. If you have to spend more time on your active commute, your chance of experiencing work-life conflict was higher.

“What I found is that public transportation actually brings more work-family conflict, and therefore creates more stress and more psychological distress,” said the lead author, Annie Barreck. “When you have work and family responsibilities, the time that you spend commuting, and the more time you spend commuting, gives you less time for other activities like social and family activities.”

In other words, driving a car may come with its own headaches, but on the whole, car drivers tend to have less conflict, according to the study. This is not necessarily universal, though. “Somebody who uses the train here is not the same as somebody who uses the train in Europe,” Barreck told HRReporter.

Barreck doesn’t see her report as a knock against public transit, however. Instead, she thinks it adds to the argument that public transit needs to be built with more coordination between the transit authorities and major employers, and that the ideal form of transit is whichever one causes the least stress for the rider.

“Public transport does not facilitate the transition between home and work and from work to home for workers,” she told CityNews Montreal. “When we look at commuting with that lens — how people are able to manage their work and family responsibilities — public transportation seems to add stress.” 

HEALTH & WELLNESS

Who slept best this weekend?

A restless night may leave you feeling tired at work, but what if your job is the very thing disrupting your sleep?

MORE FROM LONDON INC.

Follow Us