Beware Hiring/Recruitment Scams
Internet scammers seek to lure unsuspecting victims with the promise of a new, lucrative job. They employ several different methods to scam victims, and they can be very convincing. They may demand a recruitment fee or use the information you provide to steal your identity.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com
Ask just about anyone and most people will express at least some level of dissatisfaction with their job. Very few people appear to be happy in their job (unless they’re self-employed) and even those that are happy rarely remain happy for very long. This seems to be especially true in the corporate world, and also seems to be universal across the developed and developing world, no matter which country or industry.
This near universal employment discontent leads to an almost universal desire for a better job. The desire for better pay, better benefits, better hours, better growth and upward mobility, better appreciation, and most importantly more respect has everyone on the lookout for the next opportunity.
Unfortunately, this universal desire has a few major downsides. With everyone looking for a new job (both the employed and unemployed alike) it is much harder to get that new job. Not only can employers be pickier about who and when they hire, but they also know that it is difficult for their existing employees to get opportunities to leave the company. This reduces their incentive to improve the conditions of their employees, which in turn creates the culture of unhappiness among those same employees.
But there is another, far more nefarious danger as a result of all this discontent. Internet scammers seeking to lure unsuspecting victims with the promise of a new, lucrative job. They employ several different methods to scam victims, and they can be very convincing.
They may promise their victims to secure a new job, in exchange for a recruitment fee. They may have their victims submit their CVs, fill out questionnaires, and even conduct fake interviews, only to use all that gathered information to steal their victim’s identity.
There is even a famous recent case where a scammer created an entirely fake marketing company and hired dozens of marketers and graphic designers (some of whom left their previous jobs) to work for his new, innovative, remote work company. There was just one catch. No matter how many hours the employees worked on various marketing campaigns, no one would get paid until the “sales reps” closed the deal with the client. After 18 months of operations, with dozens of employees, and constantly hiring new employees with fake/phantom interview panels, not a single deal was closed, and no one ever got paid.
Very recently I received an unsolicited email from someone claiming they are a “Senior Executive Recruiter” and that I might be a good fit for one of their clients, based on my LinkedIn profile. They requested that I send them my CV. See screenshot below.
At face value this would seem like a great opportunity for landing a potentially lucrative position with their “client”. Just that I’m paranoid and suspicious by nature and can smell a scam from a mile away. I started investigating right away.
Did a google search of the company and got no results. First red flag.
Went to the website. Simple, professional looking website. Nothing too complicated. I could whip up a website like that in less than a week if I wanted, which is exactly what they did. I used a tool called WhoIs (https://lookup.icann.org/) that allows you to find out information about a website, who registered it, and most importantly when. Although they hid who registered the site, they couldn’t hide when the domain was registered. Although the website claimed that they have been in business for over 30 years, they only registered the domain on September 21st, 2022. Just days before sending me their scam email.
That’s about 20 red flags all rolled up in one.
But I decided to dig a little further. On their about us page listed the members of their management team, including the one that supposedly emailed me. The pictures of every single member of their management team looked like a stock photos plunked from the Internet. More red flags.
Decided to dig even further. Google has a feature where you can scan an image and search for that image online. So I did a search of the photo of the guy that wanted to recruit me for this great job. And Google found a most interesting match.
It found another COMPLETELY identical website with the exact same “management team” except for: The company name (and domain name) was different, the names of the management team were different, but with the same pictures, and although they were listed with the same address this new company was on a different floor. Oh, and the website for this other company was registered in August 2022.
So now I had collected all my evidence it was time to act. The WhoIs tool also provides information about which service provider the domain is registered with, and that service provider’s abuse reporting email address. So, I sent an email to them informing them of these two sites registered on their platform are clearly being used to scam people. Hopefully both sites should be shut down soon.
Of course, this does not stop them from trying again with a new website, but if we are all vigilant, and report scams when we come across them, we can all make the lives of scam artists just a bit more difficult.
About Author
