Tag: scams

An experiment in hiring in 2026 – an epilogue

I thought that the little experiment in recruitment fraud finding, which I started on Sunday, would be done and over after yesterday’s update, but as it turns out there was more to uncover.

Checking my email this morning I found three more emails in my inbox! Each one as dodgy as the four I already mentioned.

One of them came to me from someone claiming to be from the “Robert Walters” recruitment agency, but the domain of the email was “robertwaltters.com”. Which obviously is a typosquatting tactic that works if you don’t pay attention to these “little” details.

Another came from a Gmail account, but a very funny one. The account that originated the scam was [name].[company].sgourmetpizzaa@gmail.com. I mean, come on. This guy was barely even trying. The interesting thing is that this came as a message that used Gmail “Confidential Mode”, which I thought was a scam until I read up on it and found that it actually exists. Nevertheless the only people I’ve seen using that feature are recruitment scammers, so I must add it to the already long list of “tells” of recruitment scams.

The third also came to me via Gmail “Confidential Mode”, and claimed to be from Northrop Grumman. Now that is a big company involved in aviation, so why would they be relying on free gmail addresses? FWIW the address they used was [lastname].[firstname].northrop.grumman@gmail.com.

So, stay vigilant my employment-seeking friends. The vultures out there know there are lots of bodies ripe for pickin’. In more positive news I did score an interview tomorrow. For Costco. I haven’t worked there for 35 years, but hey, it’s a job.

An experiment in hiring in 2026: the unsurprising conclusion

See part 1 of this exciting experiment here!

Unsurprisingly, all four “new connection” recuiters turned out to be scammers. I noticed that 3 of them no longer have LinkedIn accounts, and I just reported the fourth one.

The game is this: these “people” (probably AI bots) pretend to be “independent recruiters” who have a job you’d be interested in. This can be sniffed easily enough from your profile. They give you a little spiel about they’re impressed by your qualifications and experience and you’re almost sure to get the job… BUT they want to make sure you get picked and your resume could use improvement! And of course they know someone who can do this, for a fee.

What are the tells? Just look at the profile. Low number of connections (for a recruiter in this economy?), their email is a free account (gmail, outlook, yahoo), often they don’t appear in the “recruitment firm” they claim to work at but they follow that company, sometimes they’ll redirect you away from Linkedin messaging and onto a proper custom-domained email account… that’s also a free email account. 1/4 of the candidates in my experiment did this, and probably just didn’t know that Yahoo mail adds branding to the emails they send. Also the custom domain had no web site. For a recruiter. In 2026.

They’ll also be as impatient as a Nigerian scammer — if you don’t answer quickly they’ll keep pinging you on Linkedin, and send reminder emails that say stuff like “looking forward to your feedback”. 2/4 of the scammers “suggested” resume optimization within 2 hours. One of them even showed that my resume had an ATS score of 39%… when all the ATS checkers I used showed high 60s to low 70s.

So, yeah. Looking for a job makes you a huge target for scammers on Linkedin. But at least Linkedin seems to be doing something about it, or at least acting on the reports they get, even on a long weekend. So, there’s something positive to get out of this.

Ultimately, if something seems just a little too good to be true, it’s because it is. The tech job market is absolute shit right now and it’s not about to get better.