Fake recruiters are catfishing desperate job-seekers, seducing them with the promise of a high-paying job before stealing their money and identity. We recently posed as a gullible recruit and let a scammer sucker us so we could learn their tricks.
Fake Recruiters Are Impersonating Real People
Here’s why this scam is so smart: Fake recruiters are impersonating legitimate people at real companies. When the person contacts you, everything appears real—a real company with a real website and a real person’s name and photo that appears in that company’s directory of employees. The scammer links you to the company’s real website and a real LinkedIn profile that seems to match the person to whom you’re talking.
But it’s a trick. The person you’re talking to isn’t who they claim to be. You’re talking to a scammer pretending to be a real employee.
Here’s How the Scam Starts
Fake job recruiters don’t just contact you out of nowhere. These scammers contact people who’ve posted resumes online looking for a job. The scammer offers a sweet work-from-home job, which could be very tempting to someone who’s having trouble finding work. The scammer poses as a “recruiter” for a real company, so it kind of makes sense that the email isn’t from the company’s regular email accounts.
We know someone who was contacted by one of these scammers, so we sent over a fake resume to see how they’d try to take advantage of an eager job seeker.
The “recruiter” was happy to get our fake resume and quickly directed us to talk to someone on Google Hangouts—in text chat and not video chat, of course. With a quick bit of internet sleuthing, we discovered the person’s name and profile picture matched a real person on the company’s website and LinkedIn. The person even directed us to that company’s website so we could “familiarize ourselves with the company.”
That company—which we’ve contacted, but won’t name here—is also a victim of the scam. This particular company is the perfect mark, as we had great difficulties reaching someone at the company to warn them they were part of this elaborate scam. A victim of the scam wouldn’t quickly be able to check that the company wasn’t hiring through Google Hangouts, either.
A Job Interview With a Real Fake Person
Our naive young job seeker (let’s call him John) couldn’t believe his luck! The company offered John a variety of positions from Customer Service and Data Entry Clerk to Accounting Executive. Despite his resume with a background in IT, he applied for a customer service position. We provided different information than we used on the resume—the scammer obviously hadn’t bothered to read it.
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Source : Scam Alert: Fake Job Recruiters Tried to Catfish Us, Here’s What Happened
