By Jane Sonnenschein · August 4, 2026

“When a job makes no business sense at all, the company is often not looking for employees. It is looking for victims.”

Although I have lived in Germany for more than twenty years, I am still something of a newcomer to international social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

I registered on TikTok a little earlier, around the time of Chinese New Year last year, but at first I posted very little and rarely opened the app. It was only toward the end of last year, when I began updating my account more seriously, that I started paying closer attention to it. I joined Instagram and Facebook even later, around the end of last year or the beginning of this one.

Even when I used social media in the past, the platforms I knew best were WeChat, China’s dominant messaging and social platform, and Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle and recommendation platform often loosely compared to a mix of Instagram and Pinterest. In truth, I had not used either of them very much in recent years. Still, because Chinese is my mother tongue, I had developed a certain instinctive caution toward the marketing tricks, part-time job scams and social-network traps common in the Chinese-language online world.

Recently, after taking a break from posting for more than half a year, I started updating my international social media accounts again to promote my independent website. That also meant occasionally scrolling through my feeds.

And that was when I began seeing a large number of job advertisements on Instagram that struck me as very strange.

Almost none of them required qualifications, experience, language skills or any particular ability, yet they promised what looked like surprisingly good pay. The jobs themselves varied widely: packaging hair clips, keychains, combs, artificial flowers, books, medicine or other small products from home.

In the videos, all someone had to do was attach a hair clip to a cardboard display card, place a keychain inside a plastic bag, or put a few small items into a box. The images were usually clean and simple, sometimes even soothing to watch. The ads also made a point of saying that the work was flexible, allowing you to earn money without sacrificing time with your children.

At first, I could not understand when Germany had suddenly acquired so many well-paid packaging jobs that could be done from home.

Then today, after seeing several similar advertisements in a row and calculating the costs more carefully, I finally understood: I had not missed some new form of employment. These advertisements had never been seriously recruiting workers in the first place.

Once You Calculate the Costs, the Job Makes No Sense

I have sold products myself and have experience with packaging, inventory and international shipping. So when I see advertisements like these, my first thought is not, “Could I do this job?”

It is: “If I were the employer, why would I organise the work this way?”

If a company genuinely had a large quantity of hair clips, bows or keychains that needed packaging, it could simply have the manufacturer package them before they left the factory. Many small goods are already produced in places where labour and manufacturing costs are lower. Packaging them there would obviously cost less than shipping loose products to Germany and then distributing them among countless strangers’ homes.

Even if the products had already arrived in Germany and needed new labels, promotional bundles or different packaging, a normal company could send them to its own warehouse, a fulfilment centre or a professional packaging service. Those places have inventory systems, quality controls and clearly assigned responsibilities. Once the work is finished, the goods can go straight into storage or be shipped to customers.

Why would a company send products and packaging materials to the home of someone it had never met, wait for that person to finish the work, and then pay to have everything sent back?

Both journeys cost money. Goods may be lost or damaged. Quantities may not match. The packaging may not meet the required standard. The person may provide a false address or simply disappear after receiving the products. The company would also have to record how many items were sent to each person, count everything that came back, inspect the quality, and deal with losses and disputes.

No serious business would ignore those risks and management costs.

On top of that, Germany’s statutory minimum wage has been €13.90 per hour since January 2026, almost €14. If attaching hair clips to cardboard or placing keychains in plastic bags genuinely paid far more than an ordinary factory job, companies would not need to advertise the positions repeatedly on Instagram. They could post them on established job platforms or through employment agencies and receive more than enough applications.

So when a job combines all of the following—no entry requirements, work from home, complete flexibility, extremely simple tasks and unusually high pay—the safest response is not to think, “Perhaps I should give it a try.”

It is to treat it as a scam.

It Reminded Me of China’s Early Weishang¹ Boom

These advertisements reminded me of the wave of weishang that swept through China many years ago.

The term did not originally describe one clearly defined industry. It emerged as mobile internet use and WeChat became widespread, referring broadly to people who sold products or recruited sales agents through WeChat Moments, the platform’s social feed, as well as group chats and private messages. Some sold face masks, skincare products, health products, food or household goods. Others worked as personal shoppers or resellers.

Weishang was not automatically a scam. Some people genuinely earned money by selling real products, building a stable customer base and running their businesses over time.

But during that boom, many projects gradually shifted their focus away from selling products to people who actually wanted them. Instead, the emphasis moved toward recruiting more agents, charging joining fees and persuading lower-level sellers to buy large amounts of inventory.

Chinese regulators later issued repeated warnings that some organisations were using labels such as “social commerce,” “e-commerce” or “multi-level distribution” to attract people with promises of high returns. Participants were required to pay money, recruit people below them and receive rewards based on the number or sales performance of those recruits—features that fall within China’s legal understanding of pyramid selling.

Many of the people who made money in the early stages did not necessarily earn it because the face masks, supplements or other products were selling particularly well. They earned it because they joined early enough to keep recruiting new layers of agents.

Later participants paid membership fees, bought packages or stocked up on products, and the people above them received commissions from that money and those sales figures.

Sometimes the product was little more than a prop that allowed the business to maintain the appearance of ordinary commerce.

What truly kept the system running was a constant flow of newcomers who believed that they, too, could pick up a phone, post advertisements on WeChat Moments, build a team and reproduce the lives of the people above them.

At the time, WeChat Moments was filled with screenshots of payments, team numbers, luxury cars, holidays, annual conferences and stories about “ordinary mothers” who had transformed their lives.

The people at the top of the pyramid repeatedly told those who came later:

“I used to be just like you. I had nothing. All I had was a phone, and now I have finally achieved financial independence.”

But many people failed to notice that those who succeeded often already possessed things an ordinary stay-at-home mother did not: a larger social network, stronger communication skills, an existing customer base, family or professional credibility, enough starting capital, and enough financial security to survive a long period without returns.

I once tried weishang myself.

When my daughter was born, our family was going through a difficult period. My husband was unwell, and I naturally wanted to find a way to care for my child while also earning some income.

At the time, I believed that perhaps, if I found the right product and kept posting on WeChat Moments, I could slowly build something.

But anyone who has tried it knows that it is nowhere near as simple as the advertisements suggest.

You need a large enough circle of acquaintances. People need to trust you. You have to keep talking to potential customers, selling, answering questions and maintaining relationships. And every time you post something and receive no response, you have to deal with a particular kind of disappointment—as though it is not merely the product people do not want, but you yourself whom they do not like.

I later wrote several essays about weishang and the kinds of people who were more likely to succeed in it. Very often, the result depended not only on effort, but on how many resources, relationships, sources of trust and social connections a person already had.

Yet the stories weishang sellers loved to display were precisely those rare cases of “an ordinary mother with nothing but a phone who completely turned her life around.”

Because those were the stories most likely to persuade people to pay.

Scammers Are Not Targeting Greed. They Are Targeting Hardship

Why did so many early weishang businesses focus on recruiting mothers?

Because the lives of stay-at-home mothers contained so many vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

When my daughter was born, affordable childcare for children under three that parents genuinely trusted was very limited in many of the Chinese families I knew. If grandparents could not help, a mother who wanted to return to work first had to solve the question of who would look after the child.

Many women ended up leaving their jobs temporarily and caring for their children full-time at home.

Looking after a child full-time is exhausting work. But because it does not come with a direct salary, many women gradually lose their financial freedom within the family. Every time they need to buy something, they have to ask their husbands for money—what people sometimes describe as living with your palm turned upward.

If the husband understands and respects her contribution, and the relationship is relatively equal, the family may be able to get through that period without too much conflict.

But if the husband does not respect her, or if relations with her mother-in-law are tense, she can easily find herself in a deeply painful position. She performs a large amount of invisible work every day, yet because she has no income, others act as though she contributes nothing. She wants to change her situation, but she has neither uninterrupted time to study nor the freedom to look for a new job.

“You can earn money while caring for your children.”

“All you need is a phone to start your own business.”

“You will never have to depend on anyone again.”

“Mothers can achieve financial freedom too.”

These promises worked not because every mother was greedy, but because they touched some of her most genuine desires.

She might not have wanted a luxury car or overnight wealth.

She might simply have wanted to buy something without having to explain herself. She might have wanted to know that, if the relationship became unbearable, she would still have the ability to leave. She might have wanted to prove that she was more than someone who moved endlessly between the child and the kitchen, with no economic value of her own.

Many of those early weishang projects were not really selling face masks to mothers.

They were selling income, dignity and the hope of regaining control over their own lives.

The “work from home packaging” advertisements now appearing on Instagram are selling exactly the same thing.

In the past, the message spread through acquaintances on WeChat Moments and stories of “successful mothers.” Today, the platform’s advertising system allows it to cast a much wider net.

In the past, you might have thought:

“She is someone I know. If she can earn money this way, perhaps I can too.”

Today, you might think:

“If this can appear as a sponsored advertisement on Instagram, surely the platform must have checked it somehow.”

The trust once supplied by a familiar person in your social circle has been replaced by the implied legitimacy of a paid advertisement.

The scam has not become more sophisticated.

It has simply become faster, broader and more precise in the way it reaches people.

What Do These Fake Job Advertisements Actually Want From You?

Today, I reported four or five of these advertisements in one go.

I reported one, and another appeared below it. I reported that one, and a little later another arrived. They seemed to multiply like cockroaches.

I even had the absurd feeling that the longer I stopped to look at them, the more the platform interpreted my attention as interest and continued showing me similar advertisements.

Once these ads lead someone into a private message, they do not all follow the same kind of scam.

Some fake job advertisements do not involve any packaging work at all. Their purpose is simply to collect applicants’ names, addresses, dates of birth, banking information and photographs of identity documents. Some even persuade people to complete video-based identity verification.

Germany’s consumer advice organisations have warned that such information may be used to open bank accounts, sign contracts, operate fake online shops or commit other forms of identity theft.

Another version tells you that you have been “accepted,” then asks you to pay for materials, a deposit, training, a work permit, software activation or some other fee before you can begin.

The first amount may be small. That is exactly why people think there is no harm in paying it. But once the first payment has been made, new charges keep appearing.

Then there are the increasingly common “task scams.”

The scammers may first ask you to like posts, review products or complete a few simple online tasks. They may even send you a few euros at the beginning so that you believe the job is real.

Once they have gained your trust, they ask you to deposit money, claiming that you must put in your own funds to unlock higher-paying tasks, or that you need to cover a “negative balance” before your earnings can be withdrawn.

German police have specifically warned about this type of task scam. The small payments at the beginning are only bait. The real aim is to persuade victims to keep putting in more money.

There is another, even more dangerous possibility: the company may genuinely send parcels to your home and ask you to replace labels, repackage the goods and forward them to another address.

You may think you have finally received the promised packaging job. In reality, the goods may have been purchased using stolen credit cards, fake accounts or other fraudulent methods.

Police refer to people used in this way as “goods agents” or “parcel agents.” Applicants may unknowingly help criminals move stolen goods, while their own names and addresses are the ones that remain in shipping records and police files.

This also explains why these advertisements often ask you to provide so much information at the beginning.

The scammers may want your money.

They may want your identity, your bank account and your address.

They may also want someone who can receive and forward goods or transfer money on their behalf.

The supposed “job” is simply the doorway through which you are encouraged to hand those things over voluntarily.

The Worse the Economy Becomes, the More Dangerous These Advertisements Are

When the job market is weak, living costs are rising and many people are desperate for income, advertisements like these become especially dangerous.

The less money someone has, the more hope she may place in a promise such as “no qualifications required, no experience needed, start immediately, earn money from home.”

And the harder it is to find work, the more likely she is to wonder whether this might simply be an opportunity she had never heard about before.

But the people most easily reached by these advertisements are often the ones least able to afford the loss.

If a wealthy person loses a few hundred euros, it may be an unpleasant lesson.

If a mother with no income of her own, already worried about rent and daily expenses, loses a few hundred euros, the whole family may struggle for the rest of the month. She wanted to earn a little money for herself. Instead, she may lose her savings, expose her identity and, in some cases, become entangled in much more serious legal problems.

That is why I do not want to stand safely on the shore and laugh at people who fall for these scams, asking how anyone could believe something so obvious.

I, too, have lived through periods when my family was struggling and I desperately wanted to change our situation. I tried opportunities that seemed as though they might offer a way forward.

I know that the more urgently someone is searching for an exit, the easier it is to mistake the faintest possibility for a lifeline.

The people who deserve condemnation are not those who reached for that hope.

They are the people who study the hardship of others and turn that hope into a trap.

Wanting to Earn Money Is Not Wrong — but Do Not Hand Your Hope to an Advertisement

There is nothing wrong with wanting to earn money while caring for your children.

There is nothing wrong with wanting financial independence, or with not wanting to ask your partner for money forever.

But a real job must stand up to the most basic tests of business logic and reality.

Who is the company? Where is it registered? Does it have a proper website and a complete Impressum—the legally required company-information page in Germany? Where is the work carried out? What kind of contract is offered? How is the pay calculated? How are the goods transferred, and who is responsible if anything is lost or damaged?

There should be clear answers to all of these questions.

If a supposed employer only communicates through Instagram messages, WhatsApp or Telegram and cannot clearly identify the company, stop.

If there is no formal contract yet, but they ask you to provide identity documents, bank details or complete VideoIdent, a video-based identity check, stop.

If they ask you to pay a deposit, buy materials or transfer money before the work has even begun, stop.

If they want you to use your own bank account to transfer money, or to receive and forward parcels of uncertain origin, stop immediately.

There are, of course, legitimate jobs in Germany that do not require a university degree. But the higher the pay, the better the conditions and the more secure the position, the less likely it is that the employer will require absolutely nothing.

Qualifications do not measure everything a person is capable of, but they are often the first key that opens the door to an interview. Language skills, professional certificates, work experience and abilities that can be demonstrated also take time to build.

That path may be slow.

It is certainly less exciting than the promise that you can earn thousands of euros a month by sitting at home and placing hair clips in plastic bags.

But real life rarely offers shortcuts like that.

When a job appears to involve almost no cost or difficulty, yet promises income far beyond what common sense would suggest, try standing in the employer’s position and asking one simple question:

Why would this company pay me that much money?

If you cannot find a reasonable answer, do not continue filling in forms. Do not rush because someone tells you that “places are limited.”

Because what is really being packaged in those advertisements is not hair clips, keychains or combs.

It is the hope of someone in a difficult situation who wants to earn her own money and regain her freedom and dignity.

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1. Weishang (微商): A broad Chinese term that became popular with the rise of mobile social media, especially WeChat. It refers to individuals or small teams who sell products and recruit agents through personal networks such as WeChat Moments, group chats and private messages. Some operated as ordinary social-commerce sellers, while others relied heavily on multi-level recruitment, advance purchases and inventory loading, which could resemble pyramid selling.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 真正被包装的，不是发卡，而是一个妈妈想靠自己赚钱的希望

German version: Was hier wirklich verpackt wird, sind nicht Haarspangen, sondern die Hoffnung einer Mutter, selbst Geld zu verdienen