Students are being conned out of thousands of pounds by scammers posting fake holiday job adverts online, with one family handing over £10,000.
Crimestoppers says the fraudsters are posting ads on job sites with some posing as families looking for a nanny.
On average victims and their families caught up in the cons lose around £4,000, with one student's parents losing £10,000.
Awareness scheme SAFERjobs has seen employment scams worth £423,773 reported in the past year with more than 800,000 people reporting suspicious activity in that time.
SAFERjobs chairman Keith Rosser said: "The students who seem most vulnerable are those in their first year at university.
"They're trying to demonstrate to their parents that they can be independent and earn on their own.
"But it's not just the students who suffer. In a lot of cases, they're borrowing money from their parents. We dealt with one case where a couple had lost £10,000 to a scam.
"We've even had families contacting us because they need help trying to explain to their offspring that they're being scammed. Some victims just can't be persuaded because they're so desperate to make it on their own."
Some of the cons include victims paying out for services such as fake criminal records checks or childcare training courses.
Scammers have also posed as families looking for a nanny on genuine sites, and then demanded that a recruit pays in advance for travel and visas which never materialise.
Other frauds involve work from home offering an unusually high salary, with victims unwittingly laundering money by cashing cheques or buying office supplies for their employer.
One victim, who did not want to be named, said: "They told me that I needed to perform a DBS (criminal records) check and gave me a link where they asked me for £100 to have it in time for the start of my job.
"When I tried to explain that it really was suspect, they told me that it normally takes at least two weeks and a lot of people have used this service and it is fine."
Adrian Tudway, head of operations at Crimestoppers, said: "We hope that raising awareness of these scams will help to prevent more young people becoming victims.”
Anyone with information can call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or through Crimestoppers-uk.org.
