As India enters its peak hiring season, Apna.co, the leading jobs and careers platform in the country, has launched ‘Apna Safety’, an AI-based recruiter verification system aimed at preventing job scams and safeguarding millions of job seekers during the festive hiring surge. The Apna Safety initiative demonstrated significant effectiveness during its pilot phase in August and September 2025, verifying over 146,000 recruiters through AI checks, which resulted in a 45% reduction in exposure to fraud for job seekers. Within two months, safety-related complaints on Apna’s Play Store listing decreased by 60%, and the app achieved a 4.7 rating on the Play Store, the highest among job platforms in India.
More than half of the verified cases pertained to opportunities for freshers and first-time job seekers, a demographic that has historically been targeted by scams. These results highlight Apna’s proactive stance on safety and illustrate how AI-driven verification can scale while enhancing trust within India’s hiring ecosystem. Apna Safety enables candidates to confirm a recruiter’s authenticity by entering a phone number on the Apna app or at apna.co/apna-safety. Recruiters are categorized as active, blocked, or unregistered, and candidates can report suspicious profiles through the same interface. Apna’s AI system employs multiple verification layers. Company legitimacy is verified against GST, PAN, and CIN records, while recruiter information is authenticated using Aadhaar.
This data is then cross-referenced with domains, legal business names, and digital activity patterns to produce a credibility score. Recruiters who do not pass these checks are restricted or blocked, thereby protecting candidates from fraud at the outset of their job search. Additionally, Apna Safety identifies common scam patterns within the app. Candidates receive alerts regarding red flags such as requests for registration fees, security deposits, training charges, demands to open bank accounts, salary transfers, or pressure to purchase digital products as employment conditions. By integrating these alerts into the job search process, Apna provides real-time warnings to candidates, bolstering trust in the hiring process. Fraudulent job practices represent one of the most enduring employment risks in India.
Common methods include scammers impersonating recruiters from various companies and soliciting fake registration fees, security deposits, or training/course fees, as well as requiring candidates to open bank accounts, transfer salaries, or buy digital products as a job condition. According to the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), Indians lost over ₹22,800 crore to cyber fraud in 2024, with job-related and part-time/work-from-home scams being the largest category of complaints. Industry estimates suggest that job-related scams alone have cost India around ₹5,100 crore. The most affected sectors include frontline roles such as e-commerce, logistics, telecalling, customer support, and warehouse operations, where hiring is most vigorous ahead of the festive season and freshers are particularly vulnerable.
Nirmit Parikh, Founder & CEO of Apna.co, remarked on the launch, stating: “Every year, lakhs of Indians fall prey to recruitment scams, and that is simply unacceptable. This is an industry-wide threat to the trust on which livelihoods are built. With AI-powered Apna Safety, we are establishing a new standard for verification and accountability in the hiring ecosystem and taking decisive steps toward a scam-free job market. In Q3 2025 alone, Apna facilitated over 2.7 crore job applications, illustrating both the scale of opportunity and the responsibility we bear. Our mission is clear: every Indian should be able to pursue opportunity with confidence, dignity, and safety.
We will continue to elevate the standards until trust becomes the default currency of India’s workforce.” Apna.co remains dedicated to offering a secure and trusted platform for the recruitment industry, providing various solutions to address ongoing challenges.
