Job Opportunity Scams: Beware If You’re Looking for Work!
Getting a message from a recruiter when you’re looking for work seems like a good thing. But what if that recruiter isn’t real? Job opportunity scams are more sophisticated than ever. If you’re looking for work, you’re a prime target for fake recruiters, fake job listings, fake employment offers, and more. And it’s not just money they’re after. In the modern job market, it’s essential to understand how these scams work and how to verify people and offers before you start your job search.
See Job Recruiter Scams with Jay Jones for a complete transcript of the Easy Prey podcast episode.
Jay Jones is better known as The Profiler – an independent investigator who has personally identified and removed over 32,000 fake job postings from LinkedIn. He helps companies and job seekers be safer by protecting companies from impersonation and taking down fake companies, fake jobs, and fake recruiters that target job seekers. He documents the scams, names the people running them, and does what he can to get these scammers shut down.
A Personal Experience with Job Opportunity Scams
Jay didn’t start out planning to take down scammers. He started his career as a copywriter. But in December 2023, just a few weeks before his daughter was due to be born, he got laid off from his dream job. People said he should go to LinkedIn, turn on the “Open to Work” banner, and post his resume. He did, and was immediately flooded with recruiters reaching out. But he quickly realized something was off. None of the eager recruiters were real.
This new direction started with his own personal anger. Jay was furious that he was in the middle of such a challenging and stressful time in his life and these people were trying to capitalize on that to steal from him. Then he realized they must be doing the same thing to other people, too. When he looked, he saw a lot of general awareness information, which is great. But he didn’t see anyone investigating them, explaining the scams, and naming the people behind it.
Jay received way more messages from fake recruiters than real ones. That’s because the real ones are busy working, not reaching out to people on LinkedIn. But scammers have dedicated teams, entire floors in their call centers messaging 24/7. Adding the “Open to Work” banner is conventional wisdom, but it makes you a target. LinkedIn won’t tell you this because they’ve invested a lot in the “Open to Work” banner as a feature. But putting it on your profile attracts job opportunity scams.
What actually raises your hand to be targeted is the Open to Work banner itself. The minute you put that banner up, you’re targeted.
Jay Jones
An Unexpected Response
Jay started going after job opportunity scams because he was angry and wanted it to stop. He wanted people to be able to look for work, find work, get hired, and get out of the job market without losing time, money, resources, and hope on scams and fraud. He expected that LinkedIn would be glad for his efforts and want to work together to counter scams on their platform.
Jay has identified over 7,000 fake profiles on LinkedIn – 3,000 of which were for the fake resume company 10 Star Resume Limited. He’s gotten hundreds of fake companies taken down. Recently, he got a fake recruiting company taken down that had 681 fake jobs listed. The company had no website, and the only two employees listed were just “LinkedIn Member” with no names. They were scraping real positions from real companies and acting like they were hiring for them.
But behind the scenes, it’s been a constant struggle. LinkedIn has looked the other way as much as they can. Talentify is an organization that’s been creating shells on LinkedIn. They have at least eight different pages – CareStream Advisory Group, Timeline Optimization Group, and Agile Grid Solutions are some of them. All lead up to the talentify.io website. Jay has laid out multiple times that this is a problem. And he provides proof that it’s not baseless accusations. But every time, LinkedIn has just quietly closed his cases without resolution. He’s now on his fourth report just about this organization. It’s a major problem, and getting these scams taken down is a slow process.
Why Job Opportunity Scams Happen
Job scammers don’t have a real company that’s looking for employees. What they actually want is twofold. Like all scammers, they want money. And they get it from job hunters in two ways. They collect your personal information – which they can then sell, use to steal your identity, or use to target you with other scams – and they scam you out of as much money as they can along the way.
[Fake recruiters] are reaching out to collect your data. They’re reaching out to steal as much money as they can from you in the process.
Jay Jones
Jay tells people to never post their resume online publicly. It’s just giving scammers free information. They can combine it with info from people search websites to track you through your whole life. They’ll find out where you’ve lived and who your relatives are. Then they can use that to impersonate you and apply to jobs. Some foreign governments, especially North Korea, do this to infiltrate American companies.
That’s just one of the things scammers can do with the information they try to get out of hopeful job seekers. But different job opportunity scams have different goals. Their ultimate goal may be trying to steal your identity to get into another company, or open credit in your name, or sell your data to other scammers, or just get you to send them as much money as possible. Often, there’s multiple motivations at once.
The Different Shapes of Job Opportunity Scams
Job opportunity scams can take a wide variety of different shapes. And often they combine different scams to get as much from you as possible. One version is a recruiter that wants you to do a background check or credit check before you apply. That’s always fake. No company wants to go through that effort before they’ve reviewed your application and decided you’re worth it. And these checks require a lot of identity information, so many people don’t think twice about handing over enough to steal their identity.
Other fake recruiters tell you that you’re a perfect fit for a great job, but your resume needs some work. They have to talk to their “resume expert,” who may be a different scammer or may even be the same person. Either way, they charge several hundred dollars to fix your resume for this job which, ultimately, doesn’t exist.
Another one is the classic money-forwarding scam dressed up as part of a job opportunity. They pretend to hire you and need you to buy a new computer for a job. They mail you a check and tell you to cash it and buy the equipment from their approved vendor. In reality, the vendor is fake and so is the check. They get your credit card info, and when the check finally bounces, you’re out all that money, too.
Sometimes the scammers don’t even care what you fall for. They send out a huge variety of messages with different degrees of subtlety. If you fall for one of the basic ones, they can sell your information as someone who falls for simple scams. If you avoid those, they target you with more advanced and complex things. This tells them what type of a target you are for future scams.
How to Tell if a Message is Suspicious
One of the big warning signs of a scam is unsolicited contact. But if you’ve put up the “Open to Work” banner on LinkedIn, you’re essentially inviting unsolicited messages. But you can get rid of 90% of scammers by checking your email.
Scammers know a lot of job seekers apply to tons of jobs and don’t keep track of them. So they often start job opportunity scams by claiming to be affiliated with a random company and saying your application looks good and they’d like to interview you. A quick way to avoid that is to go into your email and search for the company’s name. If you don’t have an email confirming that you submitted an application, then you didn’t really apply there – and that’s a scammer.
Another thing to watch for is a tactic Jay calls “recruiter love bombing.” They’ll tell you that you’re exceptional and wonderful, your skills and resume are amazing, and they can’t believe you haven’t been hired yet. If you’ve been looking for a while, it’s a welcome difference from the constant rejections, ghosting, and lack of feedback. It makes you more likely to go along with whatever they ask for next.
How to Verify a Recruiter
Sometimes fake recruiters will make up a company, but sometimes they will pretend to be representing a real company. You can verify that by looking at their LinkedIn profile. If they have no or few connections in general, or very few that actually work at that company, that’s suspicious. It’s also suspicious if they have no posts about that company. No photos of them at company events can also be a warning sign – but some people work remotely and don’t come on site, so that’s not necessarily a red flag by itself.
The best thing you can do to verify recruiters like this is to call the company and ask if they’re legitimate. It’s a lot of work and requires waiting on a response, but it will tell you for certain. A quick thing you can do is run quick Google search with their name and the company name and see what comes up. If the only thing that shows up is the LinkedIn profile, then they’re not really working with that company.
If they reached out via email, the email address can be a giveaway, too. Is it coming from a corporate address? Gmail and Outlook themselves aren’t scammy, but if a recruiter is emailing from a Gmail account, that’s a scam. Any legitimate recruiter would reach out from a company email address. You can also check the domain of the email address – the part after the @ symbol. Some scammers don’t bother to register the domain, so putting it into Google won’t go anywhere. You can also use a WHOIS tool to see how long a domain has been registered. If they say they’ve been in business twenty years but the WHOIS says the domain was set up last month, it’s a fake.
How to Spot a Fake Job Posting
Job opportunity scams aren’t just based around recruiters trying to contact you. Scammers also put up fake job listings and hope you apply. They often copy and paste or use scrapers to steal job descriptions from real listings and use them for their fake ones. There’s no legislation against these scrapers, though Jay thinks there should be.
Unusual errors and things that don’t make sense are still the biggest giveaways of fake job postings. Because they’re stealing the posts from other companies, they may forget to change things, so it might contradict itself. The job description saying the role is remote and then the summary at the bottom saying it’s actually on-site or hybrid is a common error. There may also be things that don’t make sense. Jay saw one job posting lately for a Head of IT and Cybersecurity role with a salary range of $160,000-$200,000. That’s two separate jobs, not one, and the salary is too low for either of them. High salaries for a job that sounds easy is another warning sign of a fake job.
Another major red flag of a fake job posting is a different set of instructions for applying buried in the job description itself. If you thoroughly read the job description, you may find that it doesn’t want you to click the “Apply” button on the site – it wants you to email your information to a specific email address instead. If you do that, not only will they have your info, they often respond that they won’t consider you for the role until you go through a credit check. Some jobs do legitimately need a credit check, but not until they make you an offer. If they want you to do a credit check to apply, they’re trying to steal your information.
Signs of a Fake Job Interview or Offer
Scammers don’t just stop at the application phase. Some job opportunity scams will go much further. They’ll interview you and even pretend to hire you. But it’s all fake. A big sign of this is moving quickly. Scammers are in a hurry to get their money before you catch on. But in the current job market, the timeline to hire is much longer. If you’re getting an offer within a few days, or if you get an offer when all of your contact has been over chat or email, it’s most likely a job opportunity scam.
As we’ve seen in this job market, the timeline to hire is much, much longer. So when you’re the one that suddenly has an offer within a week or a few days … that’s a red flag.
Jay Jones
Fake interviews often rely on candidates being so desperate that they’ll submit to anything for the chance to get a job. They do things like one-way interviews where the interviewer has the camera off but the applicant has to have theirs on. With that, you have no idea if they’re secretly recording you. They could be collecting your face and voice to use as a deepfake. Fake interviews often ask for info that you shouldn’t give out that early. Nobody needs your social security number at the interview stage. And interviews can also be for other purposes, too. Jay had a friend who worked in cybersecurity who had an interviewer asking very specific questions about his last company’s security. It turned out they were scammers trying to find a way into his last company.
Ask Questions They’re Not Prepared For
A lot of these scammers are in foreign countries, and English isn’t their first language. But they have very thorough and detailed scripts, containing dozens and dozens of messages to get them through the conversation and get your information or money. But they start to struggle when you go off-script. If their responses were very fast, and then suddenly get more delayed, that’s a sign that it could be a job opportunity scam and you’ve gone away from their script.
Jay recommends trying to ask questions that scammers wouldn’t be prepared for. When you ask a question that’s not in their script, they have to find a way to answer professionally on their own. That’s when they start to fumble and you can see the truth. Jay recommends asking to talk to the benefits manager with specific questions about benefits. It’s hard to make up something like that on the fly, especially with things like benefits that should have documentation they can send you.
Other good questions are asking who else they’ve hired recently and if you can reach out to hose people to ask about their experience in the company. You could even just ask if they are a scammer. When you go off their script, they have to rapidly respond to you as themselves. If they’re scammers working with detailed scripts, you’ll see their conversation start to become less polished or less coherent. If they are a scammer, they may even realize they’ve been burned and block you.
Protecting Yourself while Job Hunting
Things happen in our brains when we’re constantly under pressure. Constant stress makes us go into survival mode. When that happens, the amygdala reduces our critical thinking and logical abilities. Nobody makes great decisions in survival mode. That’s why a lot of people look back at the things they did in survival mode and feel stupid because the scam seems obvious. They’re not stupid – they were just in a complex, stressful situation, and scammers took advantage of that.
For most people, job hunting is a stressful time. You have the constant weight of trying to provide for your family and worrying about whether you’ll get evicted. But at the same time, you’re trying to present yourself as perfectly fine and happy because it’s not professional to talk about all of these stressors. So it’s difficult to pinpoint a specific headspace you should be in while job hunting. Ideally, you shouldn’t be stressed, hassled, or under pressure – but in reality, that’s almost never the case.
The best mindset to have to protect yourself from job opportunity scams is vigilance. There’s a difference between paranoia and vigilance. Vigilance is looking at everything as if it could potentially be harmful, and verifying that it isn’t before interacting. Jay hates giving this advice, because it’s more work for everybody. But we can’t just assume everyone’s legitimate anymore. We have to look at everything critically. If we assume everyone we interact with is legitimate, we’re going to get burned.
You can’t just go forward like everybody is legitimate anymore. You have to actually look at every single thing critically.
Jay Jones
What to Do If You Think You’ve Been Scammed
Even if you didn’t send money, it’s important to act immediately if you think you’ve encountered a job opportunity scam. This is especially true if you went through a “credit check” or “background check” process, provided any information to set up payroll, or gave the scammers any other information.
First, freeze your credit through all three credit bureaus. This will prevent them from opening new accounts in your name. Your phone number is almost certainly compromised, so it’s not a bad idea to consider changing it. It’s unfortunate and inconvenient, but can be necessary because you’ve now been flagged as someone who falls for these kinds of scams. You’ll start hearing from more scammers, with ever-more-convincing ploys.
A better way to protect yourself is to create a burner phone number and email address just for job hunting. You can set up a VoIP phone number with Google. That provides a barrier between your real information and job opportunity scams. When you get hired in a legitimate job, you can give your employer your real information and delete the burner email and phone number to protect yourself.
Connect with Jay Jones on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/theprofiler. You can also check out his website theprofiler.org or email [email protected].
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