Scams come in all shapes and sizes, and the Hays or HR Hays scam (hrhays.com) is a textbook example of one dressed up in corporate branding to appear legitimate.
Some scams disguise themselves as investment clubs, others pretend to be platforms for trading or renewable energy startups. But the Hays scam — or HR Hays, as it is also punted — takes a different route.
It mimics an internationally recognised recruitment company, complete with stolen branding, and passes off fake employment tasks as a way to lure users into deposits. It is calculated, insidious, and speaks directly to the economic vulnerability that many face today.
The website in question is hrhays.com, not to be confused with the legitimate hays.com, which belongs to Hays PLC, a UK-based global recruitment company. The real Hays is aware of impersonation scams and has published an alert on its homepage.
But this specific iteration — a task-based fake employment scam targeted primarily at South Africans — is particularly dangerous in how it merges deception with pseudo-professional structure.
A Fabricated Career Ladder That Starts with a Deposit
The Hays scam positions itself as an opportunity to earn money through tasks, starting from “Intern” level and progressing through a structured hierarchy — H1 to H9. But unlike real employment where effort and skills matter, here, advancement is pegged entirely to how much money you deposit.
The entry level — H1 — starts at R600, and promises R20/day in so-called salary. By the time you reach H9, the platform claims you’ll receive R30,000/day for a deposit of R720,000. A fabricated salary grid details how each level unlocks more “task income” and “rebates,” with users encouraged to climb the ranks and recruit others to do the same.
It’s all structured to look orderly — even professional — but it’s nothing more than a thin veil over a pyramid scheme. No tasks are linked to any actual clients. There’s no backend employer, no HR structure, and no legitimate entity managing payroll. The only function is deposit collection — and the only source of revenue is new victims.
Appropriating the Real Hays: Identity Theft as a Foundation
By appropriating the Hays name and logo, the scammers behind hrhays.com are not just mimicking brand familiarity — they are intentionally leveraging the perceived stability of a multinational firm. T
o the unsuspecting, the illusion is convincing. The domain design mimics corporate styling. The language reads like HR copywriting. And the structure is framed like a legitimate onboarding process.
But the legitimacy ends there. A check with CIPC reveals no registered entity in South Africa by the name of Hays or HR Hays. A search of the FSCA’s FSP database confirms that this operation is not a licensed financial services provider — meaning it has no right to accept deposits, manage funds, or promise returns.
The domain hrhays.com was registered on 21 July 2024, through Gname, a registrar already flagged in several of our previous investigations (see: C42D, Rexvier, Pixel Turing). While the registrar’s Trustpilot rating has curiously risen from 1.6 to 3.5 since March 2025, its use by scam operators has not abated.
Fake Tasks, Real Deposits — and Manufactured “Earnings”
According to the scam’s materials being circulated on WhatsApp and Facebook, each H-level allows you to complete a certain number of “tasks” per day — usually five. These tasks are nothing more than arbitrary button presses or page views. But you’re told they generate revenue for brands like TikTok, YouTube or advertisers.
In one slide, the platform even presents a “Company Operation Strategy” showing a supposed loop where “tasks” boost content visibility, which then brings in advertising money, which is in turn redistributed to users. It’s a complete fabrication — a textbook pseudo-economic model created to sell a lie.
The reality is simpler. No external brand is paying anything. The only money circulating is from user deposits — and only a fraction of those deposits are redistributed as “wages” or withdrawals, at least until the scam collapses or exits.
The Raffle Gimmick, Gamified Traps, and Dopamine Lures
What sets this scam apart from many others in the same category is its excessive use of prize-based recruitment schemes, designed to encourage gamified behaviour and exploit the promise of “extra rewards.”
Promotional images on the platform and across social media advertise a range of incentives:
- Recruit 5 users and win a 5L bottle of cooking oil
- Recruit 10 users for an air fryer
- Recruit 20 or more for a Huawei phone, a Hisense TV, or up to R10,000 in bonus cash
There’s even a “Turntable” raffle where users spin for cash bonuses, mobile airtime, gadgets, or “points”. One image shows cash options from R111 up to R500, including a “Lucky Jackpot” prompt. But as with everything else in this ecosystem, the illusion is the product. The rewards are either never delivered, or used purely to stimulate further deposits and activity.
Even mobile data — specifically Vodacom and MTN data bundles — is used as bait. The platform claims users can earn up to 120GB of data by referring others. But to activate the reward, users must be at the H1 level or higher — meaning they must first deposit money.
The Bigger Picture
Scam cycles often follow a familiar pattern: quiet rollout, growth phase, peak hype, and then silence or disappearance. In this case, the Hays scam began circulating quietly toward the end of 2024, but began spiking in early March 2025, with notable surges on Facebook and WhatsApp group chatter and local Google search trends.
It is no coincidence. The ramping up of incentives, referral rewards, and “salary charts” is a clear indicator of the scam reaching maturity — the phase where deposits peak and exits are planned. At the time of writing, no public collapse has yet occurred, but it is only a matter of time.
As always, it’s important to reiterate: there is no investor protection when it comes to schemes like this. There is no ombud to resolve disputes, no regulator to escalate withdrawals to, and no customer service department beyond the fictitious WhatsApp admins who disappear the moment payouts stall.
You can report the scam to the South African Police Service, but based on precedent, recovery of funds is unlikely. Even when financial institutions do manage to intercept accounts, the restitution process is slow, bureaucratic, and rarely reaches victims in time — if at all.
The Final Verdict
HR Hays is not an employer. It is not a recruitment platform. It is not a tech-backed income solution. And it is certainly not a partner to any of the legitimate companies whose names it so freely invokes.
It is a scam. And like so many scams before it, it uses a polished interface, a recognisable brand, and the language of opportunity to bait victims into surrendering their money under the guise of professional growth.
The documents are fake. The salary charts are fake. The prizes are fake. The tasks are fake. And most of all — the promise is fake.
This is not your side hustle. It is not your online job. It’s your money in someone else’s account.
And when the site disappears, there will be no explanation. No recourse. No refund.
This isn’t employment. It’s extraction.
We’ve seen it before. And we’ll likely see it again.
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