Carl Kutsmode | Recruitment Fraud | Live on Shally Alley

All right, party people, it's your favorite sourcing sensei, Shelly, here live on Shelly's Alley. It's May 3rd. Happy May. I think that means that we are officially in spring, um, allergies and all the other fun stuff that comes with that. Your, your kids are home probably in the next couple of weeks here, so let's see if we can, uh, have some fun before all that happens. So today's topic is something that I've been tracking for a while, but don't have a lot of deep expertise in. I've taught a few classes on it, but not to the degree that our guest speaker here has today, or our guest today. And that is the subject matter of fraud in our industry. Not recruiters committing fraud, but fraudsters and scammers committing fraud on job seekers in our name, on our behalf. In other words, like cheating people out of Well, lots of things. And over the last several months or almost, I think, a whole year if I'm not mistaken, our guest today, Karl Kutzmaul, has been doing extensive research on this due to an event that occurred. And he's kind of become, you know, a specialist expert in this. So here to talk about how to protect your company's reputation and your candidates from getting ripped off or scammed is none other than Carl Katzmode. He's an SVP at Talent Rise, which is part of Praxi, a global consulting firm. Is that right?

Yep. Correct. Correct.

Carl and I have gone way back to many, many, many years. We've been to conferences together. He's brought me in to present at association. And we've just stayed in touch over the years and he's always been someone that's very deeply involved in the, even though he's in a very high-level leadership position, been very deeply involved in the lives of recruiters in that aspect. So really happy to have you here today to kind of enlighten us about this. I've been at a company where I don't wanna say we were victims, but I've been at a company where we had this, where people were contacting us because they're like, oh, I saw this job. Is it really you? And things like that. So I'm aware of this, but apparently it can get, it can be a pretty devastating, pretty big deal. So why don't you tell us how common is this? Does this happen to everybody or?

Yeah, Shelly, again, thank you for inviting me today to share this. And part of this was initiated by a personal experience that our firm experienced last fall. And so I got firsthand experience trying to deal with the both job candidates and the internal people in my organization that I had to mobilize in order to get our arms around this and, and get it under control. Um, this is becoming a more and more, uh, widespread— it is something that is out there in, in the marketplace that even job candidates aren't trusting our recruiters when they're reaching out to them anymore because they've gotten about, you know, just about every job candidate has had some experience, but the damage that this can do to, you know, an employer's brand is tremendous as well as a recruiter's brand. Because if candidates don't trust you when you reach out to them, you know, it's, it's hard to get— it's hard enough to get people who are passive candidates to respond to you when you reach out to them and you try everything you can. But if you're reaching out on text or if you're reaching out on email and they're not responsive because they don't trust that the source—

they don't think that you're a legitimate job.

Yeah, yeah, it's going to be damaging. And then the damage to the employer brand can be tremendous, right?

Um, you don't even realize that they're using your brand to scam people, and there are people that are essentially getting ripped off and they think it was somehow related to your company, right?

And then they're posting bad reviews on your company. So You know, this started for us, um, like, I think it was about last July or August. We started getting inquiries through our website. Now, we do executive recruiting, so we don't post our jobs on a job board or career page on our website. So we might post them on LinkedIn occasionally if the client wants us to or we feel it's going to help. But, you know, typically we're not doing that, and we definitely are not posting $30 an hour remote entry-level data entry jobs, which is what people were coming to our website and saying, hey, I applied to this data entry with remote work and I haven't heard anything yet. We're like, oh my God, what's going on? Go ahead, Shelley, do you have a question?

I know, I just said it's that it's what they were saying that you had posted. You're like, that's not my job.

Yeah, it's, it's not our job. And so I, I personally was receiving those inquiries because usually it's meant for clients coming to your website. And so I started responding to them individually with, hey, share a little bit of information. You know, this is obviously a scam. We don't post those kinds of jobs. These are the things that we do. And I tried to, you know, contact or reach out to people just to understand what they were experiencing. And, you know, what we were understanding from the conversations that we had with people were they were either getting, like what we do, proactive emails sent to them 'Hey, you look like somebody that would be good,' and they were being represented by our recruiter. So they set up a— they would look like our recruiters and they would approach candidates online, or they were posting jobs and using our logo and our branding. And then eventually what we found was they had actually cloned our website and found a domain in our name and put up a website And it was one of the domains that we forgot to renew. Like, I think it was like a.net domain.

Oh, wow.

And we were like, oh my God, you didn't need any more. We didn't need it. You know, we had gotten acquired back in 2019. Our parent company, you know, was in charge of the website. We weren't keeping tabs on it and the marketing department was running with it. And I think they were able to grab that domain and put up a site. So here they are posting jobs on LinkedIn or Indeed or other websites and, and, uh, it's in our name, it's in our brand. And so, you know, what they're trying to do is capture candidates' information. Ultimately, what's the point? Yeah, they're, they're phishing because at the end of the day, if they can get somebody engaged and then offer them a job— because so many jobs were offered remotely during the pandemic— then they can offer them a job and send them the information for onboarding. And what happens during onboarding, Shelly?

I mean, give a whole bunch of information, you know, email addresses, your alternative phone number, your mailing address, your Social Security number, your— I mean, that's where you sign all the documents. That's where you put all your stuff in, right? Yeah.

And in this case, they literally were going through an entire chat interview, which is very popular with in the day of AI where companies are using AI chatbots to do, you know, almost a complete prescreen of a candidate. And at some point they go, great, you know, we like you, we're going to offer you this position. And then they show an offer letter and they go, it's a real offer letter.

Like it's not real, but it's like a real looking offer letter.

Exactly. With our logo on it. And then they send it to them and Of course, the person is excited. They've had this great interaction over chat, and then they go, well, now we're going to introduce you to your onboarding person. And then the onboarding person—

it's really sophisticated.

It's another person that is on our team.

It's like, this must be a big company because there's an onboarding person, and they're like, where do we ship your laptop? And what's your credit card? And we need to buy your airplane ticket and stuff like that.

Oh yeah. And so in this case, the onboarding person was one of our other recruiters. So the Recruiter A that they were using handed off to Recruiter B and they had their LinkedIn profile was what they were using. And, you know, looked very official. And they said, so-and-so will take you through the process.

It was a real person, but a fake profile.

Well, they, they were doing this all via chat, all via text chat.

So they basically were impersonating someone.

They were impersonating the recruiters. They were impersonating two of our recruiters, one that approached them either following up on a job ad or approaching them like we would as a passive candidate. And then once they got them hooked and they did their Q&A via a chat and they, they vetted them, so to speak, they said, hey, you know, we're going to make you this job offer. And they send them the offer. And then the person, you know, hey, did you sign the offer? They send it back. And then what they tell them when they get to the onboarding person is, okay, part of the onboarding is we got to order you some equipment that's customized for just you.

Oh my God.

And we're going to mail you a check. So that's where the identity theft—

oh, so now they get the bank account. Wow.

So they're going through the onboarding, they're giving them bank account information, personal information, and they're going to mail them a check. And the check that they send them is somehow coded and they give them very specific instructions. We had one candidate who, she got into this. When I told her screenshot everything.

Oh, she helped us.

She was like a sleuth. I told her she should be in cybersecurity.

Right, sorry, sir.

So she basically sent us a screenshot of the entire conversation and she was the one who walked us through what was going on. But once they sent her a check, they kept following up. They're getting urgent. They're like, did you get the check? Now you're going to deposit that check via your ATM or your phone banking app. Don't go to the bank. So they gave very specific instructions. And the reason they did that is the bank might catch on to it. They may have had coding in the check or something, or it may have bounced right away. Who knows? But I think there's a lag when you go through the ATM or through your app. So they kept following up with the individual and she's like, yes, I got the check, but I can't get to the bank. They're like, no, no, no, don't go to the bank. You got to do it through your app or through that.

Oh my God.

So she played along eventually, and at some point she cut them off when they were like, did you deposit the check yet? And that's when she cut them off. And she actually sent us a screenshot of the check at the end of the process. But at the end of the day, they wanted to get access to their bank, and that's where the payment scam came in. We're going to send you a check to go buy your equipment for your home office. And you got— they even told her, you got to buy it from our vendor. And because then they get the money back if the check was viable. But, you know, they somehow would gain access to her bank account and clean her out. You know, I think that the key here, what we ended up learning from all of this is that I'm kind of— this is part of a presentation I did for a big global organization. But, You can see, you know, in postings, there's little things that you can look for when you, when people are reporting this, that, that will flag you that, hey, there's websites out there that are scam websites too. You've gotta really pay attention to stuff that what, what candidates are sharing with you when they're coming to your, you know, coming to you and alerting you on this stuff. Did you have a question, Shel?

Uh, no, I'm actually going to take these— these links are really good, so I'm gonna, um, I'm gonna post the links here. Keep, keep going.

Yeah, and you know what, another thing that they did in some of the communications that we had, um, they would reference an email that they might get and it would say, please click this link to fill out our employment survey. And I, you know, the links that they would click, some people would click it and say, I filled fill out the survey, it seems strange. It's probably loaded with viruses or things to gain access to their, to their computer, to their accounts, who knows what. So we also had to put some notices out there and send personalized responses on our website, in our email communications that this is going on, be aware, We never asked for personal information during this process.

So they— so you're just not disclaiming, but you're announcing it on your website so that when somebody comes there and it's like, I wonder where the job is, they see, oh, this is not— this is happening. Okay, got it.

Yeah. And then you can see here the two recruiters on my team that they actually were impersonating. The gentleman at the top was the recruiter who supposedly reached out to them, and the one on the bottom was the one that was the onboarding specialist. Um, So ironically, the one at the top, they probably chose because he's a former CHRO and would be very credible.

So this person's profile is real. That really is them. But the messaging in the email, the scammer was pretending to be him. And what email address were they using? Like some kind of Gmail account with the person's name or something?

Yeah, I think they, they even cloned an email account. I mean, it looked all very legitimate. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was, it was crazy how it was going. Um, you know, I can't really show too much here because I didn't block out the individual's name, but I just want to show you she screenshotted the entire interaction all the way down to the check that she received at the end. So this person single-handedly helped us take them down, you know, shut down the website. We had to go to the domain host for the website they cloned Our marketing team jumped into action and put information in our footers of our emails, on our website pages, on our job postings about beware of, you know, resume or online recruitment fraud and things like that. We reported it to all of the government. We had our IT CTO involved and he reported it to all the government scam agencies. We, because the candidates started screenshotting and sending us information, we were able to share that with IT. They were using that information to go out and do deeper dives and actually track it down. I don't recall where they specifically found this was coming from. It definitely was outside the US, but I think it was like Eastern Europe and, you know, may have even been Russia. Who knows these days? But, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to rally the troops. I think the lesson learned here is, you know, you've got to be aware of this stuff. When people raise it to you, don't take it lightly. It could be going in a much bigger way. Yeah.

So how did this start? In other words, not recruitment fraud, but like, so what's the opener? Do they— the scammer, as you know, impersonating the recruiter, do they they send a text message or a LinkedIn chat that says, hey, I have a job, are you interested?

They mirror what we do as recruiters. Uh, it's like, your profile looked great, we've got this awesome, you know, data entry job, it pays $30 an hour, you can work from home. They make it as attractive as possible, right? Like almost too good to be true.

And people think it's a legitimate job offer because they're being approached by someone that looks like the right person. And so they click on the links and they fill out the paperwork. And are there any, um, are there any protections? Like if you get— if, if they are able to get into your bank, you know, you end up getting scammed and then realize it too late, are there any protections that are offered? Like, you know, will you be able to get your money back or are you just— you just lose your money?

I think it depends on the bank that you're working with and the country that you're in. You know, like I know that Um, it's all in the fine print of your banking, uh, online banking stuff that you probably have never read. But it would be certainly something that I would check out just after going through this. I haven't done it yet, but that's a good point. I, I think it would be worth checking out and just seeing, you know, is my bank protect— do they protect me if I have something like that?

If I get scammed, right?

Yeah, if I get scammed.

So what is that? Give me that. I hate to be the, um, I hate to be like— I don't want to be a pessimist, but like, what is the worst-case scenario that, that has happened? People actually losing like a lot of money? Or like, what's— how's— how far have you seen this go?

Yeah, so I think it was— there was a statistic earlier in the presentation, it was like $793,000, and since 2019 is what they estimate, you know, that's what they could actually track and what was reported of people being scammed by online recruitment scams. The average, uh, fee, you know, the loss per individual is about $12,000.

So basically what you're saying is the worst that can happen, aside from you wasted your time and you didn't get a job, but the worst that can happen is they actually get a significant chunk of money. Yes, your bank account, or from your— or from you sending them money. And it's pretty sophisticated. So if you get a message, the word to recruiters and leaders in talent acquisition out there is if you get a message or if your candidates get a message from someone offering them a job that you are not familiar with, it's— this could possibly be fraud. So I guess alert your candidates that if they are being approached by a recruiter, that they need to go to the company and check if that's a real person, like actually go to the company like they were doing with you. This, this lady that helped you catch these guys, they went to you and then you were like, oh, that's not us. So that's— yeah. Okay.

Fortunately, the job candidates, you know, they would be, even though the website that was linked to the fake job posting was probably back to the talentrise.net website.

It was a copy of your website.

People automatically think it's.com, and so they would search on.com if they didn't click their link in the, in the posting, and they would come to our website and see we didn't have a job board. And so they'd go through the info@ where they just can put a, you know, a statement and say, hey, this is what's going on, I applied to your job and, you know, and didn't hear anything. And That's where we were getting the inquiries. I was personally getting them and responding to each of them. And they started out like 2 or 3 a week. And then about the third week it went to 10. And then by the fourth week it was like 15, 20.

That's every day. I mean, multiple a day.

Every day. Every day you were getting them. And that, I mean, after the second week, I said to my IT team, my marketing team, and my legal team, like, you guys need to pay attention. We have 5 recruiting brands. If they're hitting us, they're hitting our others. And so fortunately they didn't hit the others.

Okay, so they hijacked your brand as an employer and your assets and your website, and they involved you. You were— your company was complicit in the crime inadvertently. Yeah, like, you know, by proxy, because people thought it was you. So, okay.

And then I see a question, you know, someone said that they cloned the LinkedIn profile of the recruiter. They I don't know how they did it, but they, they would use the profile of our recruiter's LinkedIn profile in text messages. So what it looked like they did was they would approach them somehow on LinkedIn and somehow they could clone or cloak and it would look like our, our recruiter's profile. So when they click on it, it would go back to our recruiter's profile and either they took them offline to their cell phone and they did a text chat looking like the profile, or they stayed within the system.

Did anybody ever contact the recruiter on LinkedIn. And then the recruiter's like, what are you talking about?

All of the— both of the recruiters that they were doing had gotten contacted directly by my candidates saying, hey, you know, I haven't heard from you. And so that started to happen about week 4, and they were like, what is this? Does anybody know what's going on? And that's when we, we alerted everybody what was going on.

Wow.

Um, I, I will say, you know, the other thing that marketing did was they went out and started looking at like, okay, are people posting bad reviews because they're worried about brand protection? And of course we had some that were getting frustrated and, and realized that it was a scam and posting, hey, this company might be a scam. And so there's reputational damage both to the recruiters and to the brand. That they had to literally go to the sites where those reviews were posted, um, and, and get those removed. And fortunately, they were all very, um, they were all very cooperative. The other thing that, uh, we did is we found the ATS system that they had used to post all of this and manage it was— I can't say the name because I don't want to get them in trouble.

It's not the ATS's fault. Yeah, right.

It's not their fault, but we, you know, we noticed where, you know, you can see in postings where they somehow were pushed out by an ATS, and we were able to notify the ATS vendor. And they weren't as cooperative in the beginning. They thought we were scamming them and trying to do harm to the, you know, the company. And we're like, no, no, no, here's our proof, you know. Um, but they finally came around. They did shut it down and, you know, put some protections Amazing.

I mean, I'm just, I'm blown away. I mean, I've heard of like little pieces of this, but never to this extent where it was almost like, it was like a, like an operation.

Um, yeah, totally. Yeah.

I mean, check out some of those, those statistics that 32%, that's basically a third of workers who searched for a job in the last 2 years were tricked into applying or interviewing for fake jobs. A third. Almost half, 48% of the people who were tricked had their personal information stolen. So a third of them were tricked and half of those actually lost some kind of, you know, PII. And then a small portion of those were tricked into sending money, which is, you know, the ultimate goal. But even, even still, if your personal information is stolen, now you're at risk for credit fraud and other kinds of things. And it's not just resume fraud, it's fake job posting, it's straight up identity theft.

Absolutely. And that's the goal of this. And it's only getting worse. So I know that on LinkedIn there is the ability to verify your profile, which I think, you know, is something to do with the CLEAR, you know, if you go to the airport, the CLEAR process. Um, so that might be one step to help to validating who you are. I'm sure there's ways they'll find out around it, but at least in the near term, I would advise recruiters kind of verify their LinkedIn profile when they're recruiting heavily online. Make sure you're reserving all of your domains and keeping those current, even the ones you don't use anymore, just redirect, even the ones you're not using, because you just never know. It's a small price to pay as an insurance policy.

Have it redirect to your main site. So they're not—

I would say even proactively, just educate job candidates on your careers page, on job postings, and even in your email signatures that you do not ask for personal information in the recruiting process. And, you know, all of the things that you could do in order to be able to alert them that job fraud is out there. And, you know, you don't—

right, alert them that, you know, there's an application form that doesn't require this sensitive financial information. It's, you know, yeah, exactly. On the onboarding is where they would do that. And of course, even warn them about the possible, you know, fake onboarding people, right? It's That was just— I can't believe they went as far as handing it off to another person who was a fake onboarding person. That's crazy.

I know. Exactly. And of course, the onboarding person was all very cordial and, you know, we're going to get you all set up and you're going to have a great first day. And, you know, they're just making it— you know, we're in a virtual world these days and people got so accustomed during the pandemic of everything being done via chat or via remote and It's, it's just something that now people are used to. So it makes it all the more easy.

So, um, they're actually paying. I'm curious about this, and you may not know the answer, but they're actually paying. These scammers are actually paying for job postings. So they are buying a job posting in a job posting platform like, uh, you know, whatever, LinkedIn, Indeed, right? So they are paying for jobs. They're putting out cash money outlay to pay for these because it's financially, you know, it's financially producing for them. They're actually paying for these. Is there— should the job boards— let me ask you this— should the job boards be responsible for verifying an employer who's posting a job? Because if they're posting a job under Talent Rise's brand but it's not you, isn't then that job board kind of like I mean, I don't want to say at fault, but I mean, they should probably verify that at least the email address is legitimate.

No, I would advocate that way. I mean, I think that's something where we can rely on our advocacy boards like ATAP and other organizations to really put pressure on job, job boards and applicant tracking systems to be a little bit more discerning on who they're working with and make sure that you know, they're legit, you know, that these are legitimate, uh, companies. You know, one thing I did notice is the postings were on weird job boards or free job boards more so than, um, paying for them. Yeah, I think, I think the Indeed allows some free postings, so they— a couple of them were on Indeed, but then there were some real weird ones like Worktree or Linktree or something like that. That just didn't make sense at all.

So probably the higher end, like, you know, Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn may have some protection in place to prevent that. Because I think on LinkedIn you can't— you, you can post a job. I know that you can post a job to your profile, like as an individual LinkedIn user, you can post a job for free. And there's certain limitations, like it runs for a certain amount of time or whatever, but it is free. And if you have a fake profile— so if I created a fake TalentRise profile, um, that's tied to some fake Gmail and they don't catch it, then I potentially could post a free job posting under TalentRise, but it wouldn't appear on the TalentRise page because it wouldn't come from the ATS, which is where the jobs come from.

Exactly.

At least there's a, there's a little bit of a curtain a veil there that sort of separates. But if you went to buy an ad from, you know, you just sign up to get an account at ZipRecruiter or whatever, and they don't verify that your email address is legitimately that company. I like your idea of doing the verification on LinkedIn as a user, but I think the other end of that would be the verification of the job posting organization confirming that you really are from that company. I remember posting an ad on Wellfound. Do you know Who Wealthfound is?

No, I haven't heard of that one.

So Wealthfound used to be Angel.co or AngelList, which still exists. I mean, Angel.co and AngelList, but they spun off the job posting side into this brand called Wealthfound. And I remember posting a job there, which it was free to post the job, but they had to verify my email address. And they had to verify that my email address matched my corporation. So in order for me to create the account for free, I had to provide my verification that I worked at this company and that email, and then they confirmed the email and then I could post the job tied to a real person. So there was a little bit of that delay. At the time I thought it was annoying, but then, but now I realize why it's, why they're doing it. They're getting smart about this. This.

Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting. I actually had a client who's a CHRO, and his son, who's a recent college grad, was going through, you know, the job search process and getting inquiries. And he's— the father started describing exactly what I just shared as, as something his son was going through. And get this, the kid got an email on Sunday evening saying You know, God, you've got a great resume, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we want to interview you tomorrow morning at 9 AM on this, on this thing. Well, he didn't check his email Sunday evening. So at 9, at 8 AM, he responds and they're like, oh no, you've missed the opportunity for that one. But you know, we'll give you another chance. And they scheduled an interview and then it followed exactly what I was.

Wow, they even did the takeaway. That's crazy.

Yeah, they did the takeaway. They made it look like, you know, now you want it more. And when the father was describing, he's like, yeah, and he's got like, you know, they're gonna send him an offer letter and a check to buy equipment. I'm like, oh my God, watch my video. I just did a whole presentation on this. And sure enough, you know, it was a scam.

I mean, no employer ever is going to send you a check to buy equipment. They'll just send you the equipment if they're going to do that.

I Exactly.

I've never heard of an employer sending you money to buy your stuff because there's just so much. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, I, you know, I think there's a good suggestion here. One of the people in the audience here has— Tina has said, you know, a link to your original careers page, you know, that might be something to do like that. You know, this is— we don't have the perfect answer. I do know we got it shut down. We haven't seen it since I think we got it shut down by November of last year. It started in August and we haven't seen it since, um, knock on wood. And our sister companies haven't been hit anymore.

But now the scammers are moving on to other— you know, they're trying to find other, other marks to, to cheat. So yeah, yeah, I'm, uh, I'm gonna put the links back up here again. So here's the— this is a— just because the, the PDF is not something that I can Um, openly share. You can contact— feel free to contact Carl through his LinkedIn, but I put the links of that page where it would— it showed the, um, LA Times, and they had the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different references, reference articles. So I think those links are really good. I put those up on a little document. If you follow that, be able to get that, um, at least get to those you know, um, links that way. But feel free to contact Carl on, uh, you know, if you're, if you're experiencing any of this or if you've heard of this and you're trying to prevent the fraud from happening to your organization.

Yeah, I'm happy to, you know, talk about whatever you might have seen or experienced. I am on LinkedIn. This was actually a presentation I did a week or a couple weeks ago, and, uh, I didn't put all my contact there because they had it up on a sidebar, but, um Yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn. I'm all over the place.

Yeah, there's that, there's that link right here. So you can connect with Carl. There you go. There's his profile and I'll put the links back up here in a minute. Just kind of recap. So basically this is, this affects the candidate and the employer. It affects the candidate in the, in the way of like ultimately financial loss. Very possibly identity theft leading to that financial loss. Definitely a waste of time and, you know, getting involved and interested in a job, getting excited about it. And then, you know, so there's that. And there's organizations might have legal ramifications, definitely branding and trust ramifications, disruption. I mean, I'm sure this took people offline at work to go handle this appropriately. So, you know, it's not something you would just, you know, click and dismiss, right?

So, well, like I said, I had my marketing, legal, and CTO, all the heads of the departments, all focused on this for a week.

And these two recruiters probably had to answer questions and you were answering questions. You know, it's a lot of work.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, um, and then the, the scam, the financial scam is like basically a payment request or a fake reimbursement. And somehow that, you know, is able to give you access to it. Not you get the fraudster access to the bank account by, you know, like I remember there was this, I don't know if you've ever encountered this or heard about this, but there was a, um, uh, this probably still goes on, a scam on the marketplaces like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace where somebody is interested in your items that you're selling, you know, your kid's bicycle. Or, uh, you're selling, um, I don't know, some used dining set or something like that, and they offer to buy it. They, they do everything via text, and they're like, hey, is it still available? I live too far away, I can't pick it up until next Sunday, but if I pay you now, will you hold it for me, and I'll come and pick it up in 2 weeks or whatever? And then they, and then they send you money. They actually send you a, some kind of, not sure exactly how it's like, it's a legitimate check. It looks legitimate, but when you go and deposit it, the funds aren't there.

Right.

So it's a legitimate check that won't, it won't come back and be declined until after you deposit it. But what they do is, here's the kicker, they say, let's say that the dining set, this is one that happened to us. Let's say the dining set is $500, right? And then they, they say, oh my God, I made a mistake. I sent you a check for $5,000. I added another zero. Could you please, you know, run to the bank and, and send me a refund of $4,500 or just $4,000 and you can keep the $1,000. Like, just like, oh, I made a mistake and I sent you too much money. But the thing is you take the money out, send it to them. And then by the time the check bounces, your money's already gone. Obviously, we never fell prey to that, but I've heard of that where they send you a check. Yeah. And then they ask you for a refund because the check is too big. It's unbelievable.

It's crazy. Absolutely crazy. Well, I think we've, uh, we've kind of covered a really good ground on this one. I hope people found it to be valuable.

I hope so too. Here's the links again one more time, for sure. And thank you so much for being with us here. Maybe next time we'll bring you on the show, we'll talk about something more, more positive. But I think this was very much worth everybody's attention. It's a very important subject matter, although not the most positive one, but I think it's, it's going to help a lot of people. So I'll make sure we get the word out on this. Thank you so much for coming. It was a pleasure and a joy always to connect with you.

Absolutely. It's great to reconnect, Shelly. And, and as always, um, you know, You're, you're the man in the marketplace on with a pulse on what's, what's leading edge.

So except for recruitment fraud, you got me beat there.

Yeah, this one, this one kind of falls in the category but with a different spin.

Yeah, very different.

Take it forward.

Yep. And, uh, for the folks out there, thank you so much for coming today, and hopefully we'll see you back here next week, May 10th. We have Thomas Licari, he'll be talking about job search struggles, ghosting, and kind of building your network. You know, when you're— he's been in the job market for a while, has some tips and tricks for it, for that, and some talk, talk about employer ghosting, not candidate ghosting. So he'll be on here next week. Until then, please be kind to yourselves, and we'll see you soon.