China’s Five Departments Warn Job Seekers Over Fake State-Owned Enterprise Referral Scams

The joint involvement of five departments, spanning human resources, cyber regulation, education, public security and state-asset oversight, signals that the scam pattern is being treated as a coordinated problem rather than isolated fraud. The targeting of new graduates matters because that group is both the most active in campus recruitment cycles and the least equipped to verify whether a referral channel is genuine. Whether the alert is followed by enforcement against the platforms hosting fabricated ads, rather than awareness messaging alone, is the open question.