How do you spot a yacht job scam?

I get sent screenshots most months. A crew agent on WhatsApp, a 60m in Antalya, a start date in nine days, and a small registration fee to hold the position. The yacht is usually real. The agent never is.

Scams work on green crew because green crew are in a hurry. You have spent real money on courses, you are living out of a backpack in Palma, and someone has finally said yes. That is the exact moment the money question arrives.

What is the one rule?

Money flows toward you, never away from you.

That is the whole test. The yacht pays you. A real crew agency is paid by the yacht or the management company, never by the crew member standing in front of it. The second an offer asks you to send money for anything, the offer is dead. Not suspicious. Dead.

It does not matter what the money is called. Registration fee. Administration fee. Uniform deposit. Training kit. Medical processing. Visa expediting. Seaman's discharge book. Crew advisories treat any request for money before you join as a definitive scam signal, because no legitimate yacht employer asks crew for money as part of hiring.

The rule survives every new version of the scam because the payment is the business model. There is no yacht behind it. There is only the transfer.

From the bridge

I have never once seen a crew agency invoice a candidate for a placement. The owner pays, or the management company pays. That is the entire arrangement.

Can a yacht agency legally charge me a placement fee?

No. This one is written into maritime law, not just into etiquette.

Definition

a recruitment and placement service is any agency, broker or crew agent that finds seafarers for shipowners. Yacht crew agencies sit inside that definition.

MLC 2006, Standard A1.4, paragraph 5 states that no fees or other charges for seafarer recruitment or placement may be borne, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, by the seafarer. There are three narrow exceptions: the cost of your national statutory medical certificate, your national seafarer's book, and your passport or similar personal travel document. Visa costs are explicitly the shipowner's, not yours.

So your ENG1 is yours to pay for. Your passport is yours. A B1/B2 for working in US waters is not. A placement fee is not. A paid membership that "guarantees interviews" is not.

The same paragraph requires the agency to run a system of protection, usually insurance, that compensates you for money lost if the agency or the shipowner fails to meet the terms of your Seafarer Employment Agreement. You are supposed to be told about that system before or during engagement. Ask about it in writing. A real agency answers in one line. A scammer changes the subject.

This is not legal advice. Check the official page before you act.

What do yacht job scams look like in 2026?

They have moved off the noticeboard. Facebook crew groups still carry them, but the traffic has shifted into yachting specific WhatsApp and Telegram groups, where the accounts are recently created, the post history is thin, and the profile photos are stolen from someone else's season.

The paperwork has improved too. Advisories from 2025 flag employment contracts and reference letters produced with AI tools: clean layout, plausible wording, a repatriation clause that reads correctly, and no vessel behind any of it.

One caveat on those PYA cases: they date from roughly 2020 to 2023, so read them as patterns rather than as live 2026 incidents. The channel and the tooling have moved on. The play has not. The ITF puts it plainly: if it looks too good to be true it usually is.

How do I check an offer before I travel?

Do this before you book anything, not after.

• Get the vessel name, length and flag in writing, then search all three yourself, away from anything the agent sent you.
• Ask for a signed employment agreement before you buy a ticket. Under MLC every seafarer gets a written SEA covering identity, employer, wages, leave, notice and repatriation. No SEA, no travel.
• Confirm the person exists outside the chat window: company website, a phone number that rings, a name that appears in more than one place.
• Ask the agency, in writing, about its MLC protection or insurance system.
• If the agent is based in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar or the Philippines, look them up on ITFShipBeSure.org, which lists officially registered agents with an ITF rating. It is not confirmed to cover Mediterranean yacht agencies, so it will not help with most Antibes or Palma outfits.
• Never meet a captain alone in a private flat or a hotel room. Public place, and someone ashore knows where you are and when you are due back.

You can also look the vessel up on Equasis, the free public ship database financed by a group of maritime administrations, to confirm it exists and who manages it. Registration costs nothing. Coverage of smaller private yachts is patchy, so an absence proves little, but a hit gives you a flag, a manager and a history the agent cannot fake.

From the bridge

Ask a real captain for the yacht's name and flag and you get it in about four seconds, because it is painted on the transom. Ask a scammer and you get a reason instead of an answer.

What if I have already paid?

Money sent by bank transfer to a stranger is rarely recovered. Accept that first, then do the useful things.

Report it to the ITF, which collects recruitment scam reports, and to the PYA if the offer was yacht specific. Tell the admins of the group where you found the post, and tell the crew house, because the same message is going to twenty other people this week. Then stop talking to them.

Do not send a second payment to free up the first. That is the follow up play: one invented fee, then a larger invented fee that supposedly releases it.

The safest first job is still the one you get face to face. Nobody has yet worked out how to run a fake dockwalk. If you are choosing between a WhatsApp offer and a fortnight of knocking on passerelles, take the passerelles: how to dockwalk and landing on the dock cover what to say and where to stand, and your first job covers what happens after someone says yes. The order of the whole hiring process is in the free guide.