The Fake Job Economy: Jay Jones on Scams, AI, and Broken Safeguards

All right, hey everybody, I hope you're ready for this session. You are live on Shelly's Alley, and I couldn't be more excited about the topic today. It may be— excited is not, um, the best way to describe it. I'm not excited about the topic, I'm like invigorated, on fire about the topic. Yeah, this is Folks, this is something that has impacted me personally and a lot of people that I know. In fact, the more I talk about it, the more I realize it has impacted people and companies. And what we are talking about is fraud. That's right, fraud, fake jobs, fake recruiters, scammers, and people that are preying on the unemployed, which I think is like, I mean, It's, it's, it's the most unforgivable of, of scams and crimes. You know, one thing, I'm not, I'm not saying that it's okay to cheat those who have jobs or steal from the rich, but if you cheat someone who has nothing and they're struggling and they're trying to find a job and you're taking their money, it's, it's just, it feels like it's the absolute bottom of the bottom. So these scumbags out there are cheating us from a lot of different directions. And so this happened to me actually, where somebody was impersonating me, sending out emails from a fake Gmail account saying that they were me with my picture and my LinkedIn and everything, and asking candidates for personal information that would lead to identity theft and all kinds of stuff. Um, so I didn't know what to do, and I asked a few friends. Everybody pointed me to Jay Jones, the profiler they call him. You got to talk to the profiler. I'm like, who's this guy, the profiler? So I went to Jay and I asked what I should do, and he gave me some ideas that helped me basically immediately. But here's a man who basically— this is what they do all day. Jay is out there like, like an unsung superhero. You need one of those t-shirts, man, where you open it up and you go, save you, saving you scams every day. That's right. You know, obviously Jay gets a little bit of money for his efforts, but it's not enough. I think he should be getting a lot more. And what he does is he helps people protect themselves from, not just themselves, but also their organization from these scams and cheaters. And I don't even know what else to call it. But before I get too far into this, let me introduce you to Jay. Jay Jones is originally a copywriter by trade who, I guess, I don't wanna steal your thunder. Can you tell us how you even got into this whole, like how you went from copywriting and your other activities to becoming the defender of public good here with Fake Jobs? What was that trigger? What was that spark that did that?

Frankly, it pissed me off because when I was laid off in December of 2023, I followed the advice and used the Open to Work banner, and I got bombarded immediately with fake resume writers. At the time, I didn't know they were fake, so I got this attention and I was excited about it. I was like, okay, I won't be in the job market long. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized these people were fake. I started to ask more questions. It's like, well, the resume writers are fake, then maybe the jobs are fake. And if the jobs are fake, maybe the company's fake. And so it led me down this deep rabbit hole. And rather than just complain about it, I decided to initially just report and block and move on and try to like continue to go about it and ignore it. But I couldn't. The more I realized that if they were trying to get me, they're trying to get millions of other people. So I couldn't stand for that. And so that's how I got into it.

So you, you found out that the people that were— well, first of all, I just want to go back in. Did I hear correctly? You put your Open to Work badge on and that's what triggered the attack?

Immediately, immediately.

So let me ask you a question, and forgive me for being ignorant here, but I thought that the Open to Work badge was something that only showed to recruiters who pay to access the LinkedIn, um, employment, uh, you know, tools. So like, if you're, if you're a professional recruiter, you pay a premium to get access to be notified when someone has an Open to Work badge. Isn't that, isn't that true, or am I, am I imagining that?

Partially. There are two versions. There's the Open to Work option where you show the banner publicly, that's where anybody can see it, and then there's the one where you show it to recruiters only, and that's where those recruiters who pay for those dedicated seats can actually see who's using it. The problem is that scammers pay that fee too, so they can see it even though you don't use the public-facing one. So I've seen it where people who use the public-facing get scammed or get reached out by scammers constantly. And then I've seen it where they have it discreetly and they send me a message like, hey, is this profile fake? Hey, is this job offer I'm about to take fake? And I look at their profile and I'm like, I don't see a banner. And I was like, okay, I get it. It's because they're still paying to actually have the seat to access people's information. The scammers are.

So there are people— you're telling me that there are fraudsters and scammers who are legitimately— they're fraudsters, but they're legitimately purchasing a LinkedIn product in order to commit fraud. So they are buying, they are paying LinkedIn. And so I'm just going to come out and say it, LinkedIn is profiting from fraud.

Yeah, because when you see a fake job and it says promoted by hire or says sponsored, that means they paid to have that job be pushed out to a larger audience so they could get more people in their phishing operation, in their scams.

Okay, so you heard it first here, guys. LinkedIn is profiting from fraud. They may not be the ones that are doing the fraud, but they are selling licenses to people who then use those licenses to send you fake jobs and steal your identity and steal your money and also send you fake messages about real people who are being impacted. So it's not just companies, it's, it's also regular day, everyday recruiters that are out there doing their job, and they're also getting faked and scammed. So, you know, you've— when we met, you had already removed some ridiculously insane number, like 40,000 fake jobs from LinkedIn. And I know we're not just talking about fake jobs, but you know, you've removed tens of thousands of fake jobs, and you've exposed impersonators that are impersonating real recruiters who are also being negatively impacted by this. What are the most— give me the top 3 most common techniques that scammers are using to lure in a job seeker? I want to start with that. What are the top 3 ways that they get you?

Well, they use AI to tailor messages that sound legitimate, and so it basically makes them sound legitimate when they're not. They'll use real recruiters' profiles as the signature option in these emails that they send to people. So they'll literally take a screenshot of a real recruiter's profile, put it in the center of their email, and then they've gone as far as direct job seekers to actual profiles that they're impersonating to say, hey, this is my profile, check it out. Or I've seen them direct people to recommendation sections of real recruiters' profiles because in your mind as a job seeker, you're like, well, they must be real if they're sending me to this page because why would a scammer send me to the page of the person they're impersonating. And so that's where they get you to buy in mentally with it. So I've seen that they'll outright steal recruiters' names, put them in email addresses, flip the name, steal pictures. They'll flip-flop and merge different information from different companies. So like I've seen them routinely impersonate Lockheed Martin and they'll take somebody who currently works at Lockheed Martin's picture but use the information from a former Lockheed Martin employee's profile. And, you know, put this hodgepodge of information together to keep people confused because you don't know how to search and divvy up this information that is all false, then it's easy to get tricked.

So they are— so the three, the top three methods are they pretend they're— they pretend to have a job and send you a job and say, hey, there's a job that matches your background, but they're not a real job, right? But it's not a real job. So So that's one way. The other way is they pretend to be a recruiter. They pretend to be a real person who is a— I should say they pretend to be someone who they're not. The person that they're impersonating is a real recruiter. So people go look them up and they see them on LinkedIn and go, oh yeah, this is a real person. But the person sending the message isn't them and they're using Gmail accounts for that. And then the third one is they're— sorry, I think I got those two. What was the third one?

The third one is they'll, um, hold on, what was it? Um, first is they'll send the message using AI. The second is they'll take— oh, they'll take screenshots of real profiles and direct people to them.

So yeah, and so they've got AI writing messages to make them seem like they're personalized. And of course, I'm assuming a lot of this fraud is originating outside of the US, so maybe the people that are writing these, um, may not even be you know, native English speakers. So they're using AI to mimic native English speaking, you know, messages and stuff like that, which makes them sound convincing. And so if those are the top 3 ways, so what are the top 3 things that we can do as job seekers to protect ourselves?

Always go to the company page first and verify that the job is actually there. Second, do a cross-reference search. So you can search the recruiter's name plus the company name that they claim to work at in Google, and that should give you a drill down of if this person is real or not. You can check the history because the one major thing that they do as well is they'll hijack real profiles that are actually real people, but they don't actively use their LinkedIn. And so they'll impersonate them by infiltrating their profile. And then suddenly somebody who has no history in hiring will suddenly be hiring and making all these posts about now hiring and all caps exclamation point.

They're not even a recruiter in there. Yes. And hiring. Right.

Yeah, but what we're trained to do, most job seekers, is you see the badge, you see the premium icon, and you think, okay, this is a real person because not only did they invest in being verified, right, they invested in being premium, so they must be real. But when it's a hijacked profile, that's why it's so dangerous.

Wow. Now what about the, um, the other side of this where it's, it's the, um, resume writer that is approaching you saying— because I, I I don't know if this is happening anymore, but I would get messages from people pretending to be resume writers and saying things like, oh, your profile isn't getting, um, isn't getting picked up by ATS, or yeah, because you don't have the right keywords or whatever, and they're offering a service. Are you telling me that that also is a fraud?

Whenever they say beat the ATS or can help you score higher in the ATS, that's a lie. Um, because, and it's also a perversion of a truth, because if you don't have your resume tailored specifically to the position and it's not a good fit for the role, then yes, you'll be dinged for that. But it's not like the ATS before, it's not like the ATS is this Terminator single resume that it gets because it's just out to tear you down. No, what they'll say is beat the ATS, and then they've gone as far because I pretended to actually be a an unknowing job seeker to one of these scammers. And I was like, okay, well, how can you help me with this resume?

Or whatever.

Yeah. And they sent me a screenshot saying I scored like 23 out of 100. And so, yeah, my resume really needs a lot of help.

But so they ran a test and you scored 23. Let me— and let me guess, let me guess. After they send you some advice, they run the test again and then you get 100 out of 100.

No, that, that comes back after you pay them. Them.

Oh, right, but you pay them and all of a sudden this test that they gave you, now you get 100 out of 100.

Yeah, they investigated themselves. Um, oh my God. But the trick was I sent a resume that said fake resume. I said my name was Bartholomew Cubbins. I said my address was Anytown, USA 123, and they didn't skip a beat. They were just like, yeah, your resume is missing a lot of information and it needs to be tailored. So, uh, if you talk to Mrs. Elizabeth or Mrs. or Mr. whoever, on Fiverr or Upwork, then we'll get you in a fighting chance to get this role. And so then they say that now you qualify, and then you'll get a quick onboarding process and a quick hiring. Then the background check comes, they steal your social, your— I mean, your driver's license. As good as done at that point.

And now you have identity theft, which is— which there's so many— we know so many things can be done, um, with you know, with your identity once it's stolen. All right, so we got stolen job descriptions. They're stealing job descriptions from real companies with real jobs and sort of repurposing them. But did I hear correct? And we've got bogus email addresses. I mean, they're real, but here's what happened to me is the person was sending email from my name at gmail.com, but it was my name, a letter, right? So it was like shallstackerl, not shallie, right? You said like you skip the letter. So most people people don't even pay attention to that because they see what looks like my full name and they don't even realize it's coming from Gmail. So I'm, I'm here to tell you, if you, if you are a job seeker and you get an email about employment opportunities from a Gmail address, it's fake. I don't even, I don't even care if there's real recruiters out there saying, but I use Gmail. If you're a professional recruiter of any kind you can afford the $12 a year it takes to get a domain so that you don't have a Gmail account. So if you get an email from gmail.com and it's got anything to do with jobs, it's fake. But the third thing is, you're telling me that there's fake company pages? So like on LinkedIn, you go to a company page— what was it, the one you were telling me, Hire Crap?

Is that right? Hire Crap. That's of, uh, last night where I heard about that because my buddy Robert—

so There's a LinkedIn page for this thing that is clearly obviously fake, and that exists. So that's out there for people to go look at, and it's everywhere.

It's everywhere. It's multiple pages. Um, there's Hire Crap. Uh, many months ago there was this page called Job for Pak, P-A-K, Amazon warehouse jobs. And then after I exposed the con that they were running, which was posting Amazon jobs and posts on the page to lead people to actually going to the page and applying to these jobs What they were actually doing was pushing resume rewrite services, but using the name of Amazon to draw people in.

Okay.

Another one was— is Prism Data Consulting. They're— they have fake jobs up there now. I reported them to LinkedIn about 2 weeks ago. They haven't acted yet. And there are like 3 or 4 more that I'm following as well. But this is a widespread problem.

So we got the resume rewriting. Now, there are— there are legit resume writers. This is a profession that has an association. and it's a legitimate— I mean, I've used resume writers in the past. I recommend resume writers that are really good.

I've written resumes for people and gotten them hired.

So yeah, I'm not saying resume rewriting or resume writing is a scam. I'm saying that the scammers are using that. So they're pretending to be resume writers. How do you identify a resume writer scammer versus a real resume writer?

Uh, there's a clear distinction. So there are resume writers that are certified, so you'll see the CPRW, or you'll see NR, I forget what the full acronyms are, but a quick check for that is if they're claiming to be a CPRW, you can go look them up, their website, and if their name is listed, then they're legitimate. But if not, there is a bit of a gray area where they didn't pay their dues and they're not showing on the site anymore. But if they're overseas claiming to be that, then I wouldn't trust it. But then also there's the other part where there are real resume writers that aren't certified that do a perfectly great job. So I don't want to say that if you're not certified, you're not good.

But the resume writers that are good aren't telling you, oh, beat the ATS.

No, never.

And they're not just saying, I'm gonna help you, you know, create a more professional profile that, you know, that tells the right story. But they're not like, let me help you, you know, get through— because there is no beat the ATS, by the way, folks. I'm a recruiter. I've been a recruiter for 30 years. I can tell you there's no beating the ATS because there's nothing to beat. The ATS is the applicant tracking system. Has a job posting and it accepts applications and recruiters read them. There's no beating it. If you apply, you're in there. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, one person or another, your application is in the system. So it's not like the ATS is actively rejecting your application. Now, in the cases where an ATS does automatically reject applications, you got a different problem, but it's not scamming, so we don't want to go there. We have a question from Cassie. Asking, do you know if this whole scam thing is making it harder for TA professionals, particularly in government space and, and defense space? Is it making it harder for them to get replies to emails, or is it not impacting? And the reason I'm, I, I'm jumping on this question is because, you know, I was talking about fake Gmail accounts, and I didn't get what I was saying. I went to Google and I said, hey Google, this person is pretending to be me, and Google replied back, they had a high-level security engineer come back and say, we can't do anything about it because it's not a real Google account. In other words, the Gmail address wasn't even a Gmail address. Like, the— yeah, there was no way for them to turn off that account because nobody actually had made a fake shellstacker@gmail account. So even the email address itself Even though it's Gmail, wasn't even legit, it was spoofed. So if that's going on, they could easily be spoofing Lockheed or, or, um, whatever. So what do you think about Cassie's question here? Do you know, is this making it harder to get response rates?

Yeah, absolutely. It's completely undermining the integrity of the job market because I get a lot of messages from talent acquisition people, HR professionals and whatnot, and they're like they're inundated with fake candidates. And, you know, the war right now going on is job seekers are saying like these candidates, I mean, these TA people are playing games and they don't want to hire people. And then the talent acquisition people are like, well, we're inundated with fake candidates. And so they're having this conflict. And the problem is when there's disconnect between getting real people to real jobs and having real people fill those seats, then the scammers thrive. And so this is why, you know, they come in with the Beat the ATS because they're playing on this mythos and this belief that these talent acquisition and HR people are out to get you and they don't want to see you hired and they're playing games and this and that. And they're tapping into that emotional sentiment that job seekers have because they're beleaguered. They are sitting here putting in all these applications and not hearing anything back. And then they're looking online to see what other people are saying and then they're buying into this belief system. And like I said, when you're filled with so much misinformation, then all— only thing it leads to is bitterness and you raging online, but that doesn't actually change the circumstance.

Yeah, if I— if you're a victim, let me tell you this. If you're a victim of a scam, I don't— I think the worst thing you could possibly do is go and get bitter and rage about it on your profile. Because yeah, you're right to be angry, but showing that anger publicly isn't gonna look good for when a real recruiter is trying to contact you. So I would just take action, right? Go to Jay, ask for advice. Uh, Jay can help you clean things up. You can put a message on your profile, but when you start getting ranty and like angry, that, that's just gonna come back, you know, later and bite you. So what I did when I had this happen is I put a little fraud message on my profile, um, that, that Jay helped me write. And you could go check it out, it was one of my posts on, on LinkedIn. Um, and it was part of what helped, but I also reported them to Google. I also, you know, reported them to the FBI and a couple of other places, and it did eventually stop. Did it do some damage? Yeah, it did a little bit, but it stopped. Um, and so, you know, you can't stop it if you become victim— become victim to this. What about, Jay, what about verification badges and all that? Is this— is this going to help at all? You know how on LinkedIn there's the— there's the, um, individual— not the employer, but the individual being verified. Does this help, or does it really not make a difference? Can the scammers do that too?

It helps, but there's an asterisk with it because I mentioned it earlier with hijacked profiles. If somebody went through the effort to verify their profile but then they're not actively using LinkedIn— because I've seen it where if a profile goes inactive for as little as 2 weeks, that's a tell to scammers that it's a good idea to try to take it over because it's not actively being used. I've seen profiles that are actively being used be taken over. And like, there was this one woman who had a friend who had her profile taken over and she got it back into her control within about 2 hours, but she was actively using it and she received emails stating that, hey, you changed your name to such and such and you also changed your picture. But that doesn't happen in a lot of cases. And one of the more recent, recent instances with this company called Tribu de Grand Lac, which is a scout company out of Switzerland, and basically they had on their about page, we are a volunteer organization and we are not hiring. They said that. And they had— when I found the page, it had 182 fake jobs. After I posted a case about it, they jumped up to 703 fake jobs. Then at its height, it had 1,143 fake jobs. And when I reported this to LinkedIn—

wait, wait. So you're telling me that this is a real organization?

Yes.

With a real LinkedIn page?

Yes.

And on the page, this real organization had a statement that said, we are not hiring.

Yes. And then they had 700 jobs at its height, 1,144.

How does an organization with a real page that says I'm not hiring or we're not hiring end up with jobs?

Because it got infiltrated by these scammers. And I've seen this happen with LHH. I've seen this happen with Levi Strauss and Co. I've seen this happen with KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools, Robert Half, like all of these entities that I'm naming. I actually posted cases and got these fake jobs taken off of their page. Another one recently was Hyundai Motor Company. Where these fake jobs were added into their real jobs and the fake jobs had a verification checkmark. But these fake jobs led to two spoofed websites of Hyundai. One was for data entry specialists and the other one was for customer service representatives. And there were 15 data entry specialist fake jobs, 15 CSR fake jobs. And the goal was to siphon candidates interested in working at Hyundai by getting their personal information and leading them down either the resume rewriting scam or the job offer scam where they steal your identity and stuff.

So now what happens if I'm a job seeker and I see one of these pages with jobs that are really not the organization's and I go and I apply and I see that it's a spoof page? Can I report it to somebody? Does that do anything? Because from what I've heard, if you report, if you report a fake job to LinkedIn They'll tell you they can't do anything about it because the report has to come from the page owner. Is that true?

That's what happened with the Tribu du Grand Lac situation because I reported these jobs that were fake and I said, hey, this— I literally sent screenshots. I'm like, hey, this page has fake jobs. I know they're fake because this is a volunteer organization that's not hiring, number one. They said it themselves. Number two, it's a scouting place. It's like the Boy Scouts. It's like they go into the woods, go on expeditions and stuff like that. So they're not hiring data entry specialists. Was typists and all of that. They came, we appreciate you alerting us to this, only need to hear from the super admin before we can take action. And so it angered me because I'm like, immediately I thought of a 911 situation where I see a neighbor's house getting broken into, I call 911, and rather than send units, they say, are you the homeowner? I'm like, and so I made a little show the ridiculousness of that response.

Then in other words, you're reporting a crime.

Yeah.

And the people that you're reporting the crime to, they're saying We will not accept this crime report unless it's reported by the person on whom the crime is being committed.

Correct. It's insane.

I did, but ultimately flabbergasted about that concept. In other words, you have a security team, you have a security team that will not accept a report of something happening fraudulently unless it comes from the person that is the registered owner of that page, which we may not even know. It's possible that if you work for that company, let's say that you're— I'm gonna throw something out there. Let's say you're a Motorola employee. You are an employee of Motorola. You go and you report this crime in progress, and LinkedIn is gonna say, we won't do anything about it unless the owner of the page is gonna report it. And you as an employee of Motorola who are an authorized representative may not even know who the owner of the LinkedIn page is because it doesn't show anywhere on LinkedIn who the owner of the page is. And with an organization that size, who knows, right? So now in order to report this crime, you're gonna have to go investigate who the owner of the LinkedIn page is. That doesn't even make any sense.

And while you're doing that, yeah, and while you're doing that hunting to find out who the actual page owner is or the admin, these jobs are up there using your business's name or your organization's name and scamming people.

Wow. Okay. So, all right. So we've got, they're impersonating a recruiter that's— they're impersonating a real person. The fake scammer is impersonating a real recruiter. And you go to LinkedIn and find out it's a real person. So you trust that, but not realizing. So defend yourself by making sure that it comes from that company email, replying to that person, sending a message to that person. Legitimately on LinkedIn to confirm it's them, etc. They're impersonating companies, right? It said like they're posting fake jobs that are being picked up by LinkedIn as real jobs. And so here again, LinkedIn is making money off of scammers once again. And then they're impersonating, um, and sorry, and then they're impersonating resume writers. And all three of these have the same objective, which is to somehow collect your personal information in order to then steal your identity and sell— and we know a million things that they can do with stolen identities. Is there any other objective, or are they just looking to steal your identity? I mean, are there other, like, are they in some cases making people commit illegal acts? Are there other types of fraud that's happening besides identity theft?

Yeah, when you talk about committing the illegal acts, that goes down money mule route, and they typically target college students for that. Typically those are jobs where like you're moving money from this account to this account, something that seems easy for a college student where it's like just you're in your dorm doing easy money or you're accepting packages and sending them from point A to point B. But that's a money mule scam. And so you can get legally charged for that. So everything goes back to the old saying of if it seems too good to be true, it is. And then touching on the resume writing thing one more time, how that really damages when they're impersonating resume writers is they'll steal templates from real resume writers. They'll mock up websites that are supposed to be that resume writer's website, and then they'll undercut on the pricing. And so this established resume writer has this long career. They've earned the right to charge what they charge. But then here comes the scammer who takes the same materials that they put out publicly, sells it for hundreds less. And so obviously somebody sees this quality product at a cheaper price and doesn't know about the real person. So they go down that road and then they get scammed.

Sorry. So we got Gmail accounts, we got people that are, you know, whose pictures are, uh, out of date and not synced up to the real LinkedIn profile. We've got jobs that don't match up, like the Boy Scouts organization, the entry jobs, right? Um, you said look out for if it's too good to be true, or the other thing I think you said was immediate start, like if you start tomorrow or whatever, that's also probably a red flag. And then what about like, do you get any pressure? Um, I feel like one time I got— I was texting back and forth with you about this one person who, who said you have to call so-and-so via WhatsApp, and they gave me this phone number. And I'm like, yeah, I just texted them with my phone. And they're like, no, no, no, no, you got to go to WhatsApp, you got to do it in WhatsApp. Why are they sending me to WhatsApp? Because they're, they're literally— and I was just going along to try to, you know, figure out what this is.

Yeah, yeah.

But they kept saying you've gotta, you've gotta text them on WhatsApp, you can't use your regular phone, you got to do what via WhatsApp. What's the point of that? Why do they want me to go to WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is an encrypted, uh, system, so the messages aren't able to be tracked in that way. So they can actually hide the methodology of the scam, and that way it lets it continue to have legs. Uh, they direct you to WhatsApp because that's their ecosystem, that's where this stuff is allowed to proliferating.

So then it's private and I can't report it. I see. So once they have me there, they can do stuff that I won't really be able to essentially report. So another, I guess, another red flag is if you're being contacted and instead of texting or calling via regular line, they want you to use WhatsApp. Not saying that WhatsApp is bad, but if somebody is in the United States and they're using WhatsApp and you're in the United States there's really not a lot of reason why you should use WhatsApp because you can call anybody from a regular phone number in the United States to a regular phone number. So maybe that's another, you know, indicator.

There's another, there's another point to that too. WhatsApp, yeah, they get the high— like, they get to continue to use that number on the network because when you get a scam message or a scam text message, you can forward it to, I believe, 7726 on your provider. It may vary. Per provider. And if they— the provider gets enough scam reports about this phone number, it'll get blacklisted. And so that way they keep the number alive too, because even though they can create more, it's more convenient for them to just work with what they have because they don't want to have any interruption.

That makes sense. Okay. All right. Now, for those of us like me, for example, that have already been targeted, and some of us might even, you know, actually there might be they might have gone beyond just pretending to be me, right? Um, what are the steps that you recommend that someone who's been scammed take? Like, for example, I, um, I did the whole, you know, reported it to Google and the FBI and put it on my profile. Are there other things for people whose identity has already been, you know, compromised that they should do? Like, I don't know, you tell me. Credit freezes? Um, are there services they can hire? What, what else, what else should you do?

After that, yeah, credit freezes, because there's no reason to really have your credit open, you know, just for no reason. Like, it should be set to where anytime credit is open or accessed with your name, you should be directly contacted by your phone number. Okay, um, work with me. I can help you, you know, put in place a bunch of preventative measures to help insulate yourself from these bad actors and train you on what to notice, what to spot, so you're better protected. But those are a few things you can do.

Okay.

Also, you can contact law enforcement, I believe it's IC3, and report it there. Now, there is a caveat where they can only act when they get a certain number of reports for a specific issue, but at least you're getting on the record.

You're adding to that tally, right?

Yeah.

Right. So folks, a little brief commercial interjection here. After this whole thing happened to me, I invited Jay to create a course on TSI University that he is in the process of building. So please check out tsiuniversity.com and sign up for our newsletter to be updated when that course launches. He is going to be launching a course on how to protect yourself as a recruiter, how to protect yourself from people that are scamming, you know, the job seekers on your behalf, but also how to protect your organization, your company, your employer, and all that. So take a minute to go and check that out. I encourage you to do that. Uh, I don't know if you want to predict when you think your course might be launched, but we're talking about what, in a couple of weeks or something like that?

No, not that— not that soon. I have more pressing issues, but I'm working on it. Um, trying not to be so much of a perfectionist, as I said offline. But, um, it'll be worth the wait. It'll be worth the purchase that it will be, because this has to stop. And in order for it to stop, you need the information and you need the full representation of it. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, check out tsiuniversity.com and sign up, and we'll be sending out an announcement on, on when that's available. Um, let's, let's go back to— I want to see if there's— can we do maybe like a dismantling of, uh, of an, uh, you know, of a scam? You know, like, can we, can we just walk through, maybe use that example that you gave, um What are you, crap? Yeah, and like, just walk through other— like a live case study of what is going on, the anatomy of that. In the meantime, folks, if you have any questions, if this has happened to you and you have any questions, this is the time to ask Jay. You can go in through the chat on Facebook or LinkedIn, and, uh, and I'll read the question out aloud here. So, um, let me know. But yeah, you want to kind of walk us through what happened there?

Yeah, so, um, I have a video on my profile about that that I filmed just before we got on On LinkedIn.

OK. Yeah.

And so Hire Crab, I mean, the name in itself, in and of itself is enough. But what they're doing is they're stealing fake jobs from real companies. They're impersonating Adecco, Boeing, Christus Health, Oregon State, Oklahoma State University, and a couple of other businesses. They stole these descriptions and have them on their page. I think right now it has 23 fake jobs and The goal here is to fish your information. And so when you apply to these jobs, quote unquote, you're sending your information nowhere to bad actors and they're adding you into their pool of candidates to target. They'll come at you and they'll say, hey, you're a great fit for this role. Let's, let's get you hired and then move you down the scammer pipeline, as I refer to it. Usually they'll say that your resume just needs some work before you're ready to cross the finish line. And then that leads you into the background check and stuff. And like I say, HireCrap, it was just The domain was registered December 26th, 2025, so it's not a real entity. The address for the company, quote unquote, goes to a hospital in India or a luxury hotel in India. And that's a common thing where they'll list an address, but it's typically a coworking space. It's not an actual physical building because they don't care about actually having a physical address because it's not a real email, right? Yeah. So it's that kind of stuff.

This is not fake. It is live right now. If you go to LinkedIn.com, company/hirecrap, you will see this page right there on LinkedIn.

Yes, it's insane. And yeah, it's, it's just, it's, it's mind-numbing. It's like you say that people are safe, you say things are trustworthy, but then this is allowed to exist. And it's like there are no employees, there's, uh, no paperwork on this business. Like, how is this allowed to happen?

Yeah, but yeah, there's technical writer, customer support, HR administrator.

Now look at the— look at each description and you'll see the company they stole it from.

Like the first one was TurboTax and Great Escape Lodge.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and the goal here also, because the more sinister arm of it is every time somebody applies to a job on a page, they automatically follow the page. And so when you have these fake pages putting these jobs that look real and getting all of these applicants, you follow them. And so other people coming down the line see, oh, this page has 10,000 followers, it must be real, must be legit. And it's not. It's a way to game— yeah, it's a way to game the system.

Wow, unbelievable. So, all right, tell me about the, the, the I guess the dark side, the sinister side of this is, you know, these companies, they're, they're taking advantage of unexpected people that are, you know, they're— I don't want to say desperate. I, I'll say for myself, I was desperate. I was looking for work and I was out of work for a while after I got, um, you know, let go from a company. And I honestly was just applying for anything that seemed like it had the right match. I was at least looking for, you know, recruiter roles and TA and different types of roles that had to do with talent intelligence and stuff like that. And I kept, I kept applying, but it never just— it never occurred to me that one of these applications might end up somewhere where someone's collecting, you know, um, my, my personal information, phone number and, and physical address and things like that. What can they do with that? What, what can someone who is doing this illegally, what can they do with my address and phone number? Just that. Just start with that, because address and phone number is commonly on resumes. Okay. It's common. So just that, that is enough. What can be done with that information?

Well, the first thing I want to say is don't put your full address on your resume anymore. It's good enough to say, you know, just the city and state, your city and state.

Right.

But I talked about this maybe 6 or 7 months ago because I started to think about you know, this rabbit hole of what can they do with just your resume, because so many people have this mindset of it's just my resume, I need to send it.

Even sometimes you apply and it asks for your address, so it may not be on your resume, but you put in your address, you know, in the application.

A workaround is you could put the, um, apartment complex that you live in, like, they're like the main, um, what do you call it, the main address, not yours. But if you also legitimate company, then that's not an issue.

Right, right, right. We're talking about the fraud only.

Yeah, but like going back to what I was saying when it came to what they can do with your resume, if you look at whitepages.com or you look at like beenverified.com and these other places, you can cross-reference somebody's whole life pretty much if you check it against resume. So if you were here in 2005 and then they find a White Pages person with the same name, they know that's your address there, there, there, and there and there. And when you think about it, that's how you fill in a credit card. And so they have this information about you, credit card application, and they have this information about you. Then they make you this offer. And the last step of a credit card application is getting your Social Security number, driver's license number. And by the time you're down in this pipeline, they, they've more than earned your trust. You think this is real. And then that's when you really get burned. And I mean, I've seen this. It was mid-December. A woman, she sent me a message saying, hey, is this job real? Should I accept it? She literally had a start date. Of, I think, December 19th.

Wow.

And it was a data entry clerk position for this company called Ivory Systems. And I looked at it and I was like, no, that's not real. And then she had a, she had a check in her possession that was mailed to her for $3,450, and it was drawn on Bank of America, but it was a fake check. And so had she deposited that check, her account would have been out $3,450. Had she bought the equipment on their approved vendor, they would have taken her card information and then ran up as many charges as possible there. Uh, it could have been horrific, but that's, that's what they can do with just your resume.

Wow, that's just, that's incredible. Uh, Cassie asked if you're seeing this only on LinkedIn or is also Indeed being, uh, being targeted. And I think, remember, we were tracking that one down and, and, and I saw that the job posting came from Indeed. So you want to tell us a little bit about that? It's not just LinkedIn.

The problem is job scraping or aggregation, or a more prettied-up term is ingested job postings. And so when you're scanning jobs that are publicly listed— because job scraping is not illegal, but I think it should be because of these reasons that we've been talking about today— when you take a job that has been listed by another company and that company's real and legitimate, and you take it and pretend you have affiliation with that company, you get to steal information and lead people down this rabbit hole in these different avenues of being scammed that I talked about, but there's also no vetting of the quality of these jobs. Like, let's say you took it from a real company but they filled the role. It's not really on that company to update it to say like, hey, it expired or whatever, because even if they do that, even if they take it down, there are ways to like use different search methodologies. Like Wayback Machine can show you whenever a, um, job was first listed or first added, the archived version. Yeah, yeah. Or scammers can just change the date and make it look like it's new. So this is the kind of stuff that leads to this grand deception.

Wow. Now it's not just fake jobs, there are also fake candidates, right?

Yeah.

So these, these fake candidates are pretending to be, um, an actual candidate that could be hired, and they're filling out applications and be entering into the, the ecosystem, the you know, company ecosystem that way. What, what's the end result of that? What's the goal of, of someone pretending to be somebody else to get a job? They're never going to get hired, obviously.

Yeah, not, not so fast. I mean, I actually know, uh, I know a case where, um, a woman was impersonated and the scammer got hired at this company for 2 years as her.

As her? Oh, so yes, so they were not— they, they pretended to be a real person and got hired as that real person? Yes, and got like paychecks and everything.

Yes, for 2 years she worked at this company and never worked at that company. And, um, I forget her name, but I talked about it a few months ago. And how it worked was they claimed to have a medical issue that hindered them from being on camera, and so the company knew that that was a plausible reason, so they didn't want to push it and then hired the person because they did a great job, so to speak. And that's more of the, uh, bait and wait type scam where they want to infiltrate, get as much information as possible either mirror your operations so they can make it look more legitimate to other candidates they're trying to scam, or hold the company hostage when they're able to add some sort of a virus or whatever to get different, uh, information taken from you.

Wow.

And yeah, going back to, um, your question about Indeed and other sites, like, it's a, it's a massive issue because when you aggregate jobs, you have to check the integrity of what you're aggregating.

Well, yeah, that's right. That's, that's true. You should be— you're posting something as a legitimate— yeah, yeah, you're right about that. Uh, I'm sitting here going, I can't believe somebody actually was collecting a paycheck, uh, for 2 years. I'm assuming they use that person's Social Security number and everything because you do have to have employment verification, you know, in order to do that. But, um, wow. So Linda is asking, what do you recommend would go on the resumes? Obviously, your name and phone number and email address and maybe city and state, but that's it? What about— what about— she's saying, what about education? What else? So what should you not include, I guess?

For the resume itself? Yeah, not your full address, not like the zip code and, you know, the apartment number or home number. That's not necessary. The city and state is good enough. If you're open to relocation, I'd indicate that on the headline, saying open to relocation, because if you just apply—

I think we seem to have lost the connection. Hopefully Jay can reconnect here. In the meantime, uh, let me put that QR code back up here for you to scan. That's tsiuniversity.com, and we will be posting his course in there. Right now we have courses for recruiters on how to find candidates and how to become better sourcers and recruiters and use artificial intelligence and automation tools. Hopefully we can get Jay back here. If not, then we might need to wrap up our session here. Sorry, folks. Here we go. Are you back? Not sure if we fully getting him back. I think the hackers found out he was broadcasting this and he got— he got taken down. I hope he's okay. Uh, well, I will try to partially answer the question. About what to put in the resume. I think— oh, here he is. I think you're— are you back? Nope, no audio. I think your name is okay, but I definitely would avoid middle names. And I was going to say, when it comes to your education, It's perfectly fine to put down that, you know, you have a degree. When an employer needs to verify education, they will do it through the application, not through your resume. So if you feel like you need to leave out the, you know, particular name of the school, that's fine too, because when we actually do the background verification, we will be asking you to fill something out separately that will tell us that. Are you still there, Jake? I don't know if we're gonna be able to get him back. All right, he's going to dial in via phone. Let's see if we can do that. There you go. You on your phone now? This should work. Looks like we have some pretty bad connection issues here on my— on my system, so apologies for that. Let's see if we can get a quick recap and I'll post it later on. Um, yeah, I don't think we're gonna be able to continue today. Well, thanks for participating, everybody. Come on back next week where we are going to have— oh, hey Jay, you're back!

Hey, yeah, sorry about that.

All right, I'm glad you're back. Everything all right?

No, yeah, it just dropped. I don't know what happened.

Yeah, it looks like you were able to connect on your phone. We did have a question I wanted to see if you could answer. What else should you leave out of your resume? And I think I was, I was saying, what about education, like the name of university?

Yeah, I wouldn't leave that out, and typically I just wouldn't put the dates that you attended because typically what that leads to is some ageism, unfortunately. But, um, if you just put the, um, university and the degree you would— the degree you attained, you should be fine.

She'll be fine. Okay. Any other things that we should omit?

Age-old things like don't include your birthday, personal interest, I'd leave that off too. Because those kinds of things, if you're sending your resume to the wrong person, they can reverse engineer that and know like what they use to actually relate to you and make it look like they're really actually giving you an opportunity when they're not.

What about your middle name? That was specifically Linda asked about that.

Middle name, you can just use the initial, but it's really not necessary to have it be public-facing, right? That really should only come in— yeah, yeah, that should only come in when you're doing the official background check from a real company.

Yeah, then definitely don't omit that, but make sure you're applying on the right— on the company's website. So, well, uh, Jay, thanks a lot for joining us. I'm sorry we had this little technical issue at the end here, but, uh, folks, we're gonna have some extra material at TSI University if you want to join as an Insider. There's going to be some additional content that you will have access to, like some handouts and things from Jay. So check out tsiuniversity.com and join as an Insider. Jay, thanks a lot, man. I appreciate you making the time, uh, and thank you so much for everything that you're doing to helping us make it, you know, every little bit help, and it helps. And you're doing a lot more than just a little bit helping us, uh, keep this place safe. So, all right, everybody, take care. We'll see you next time on Shally's Alley. Our next guest is going to be Al Elzainy from RocketDevs. So look forward to that. We'll see you here in one week. Be kind to yourselves. Bye-bye.