The Job Offer That Wasn't
The email arrives like a lifeline.
It knows your background. It references your résumé. It bears the name and LinkedIn profile of a real recruiter at a real firm. The job's pitching exists — you checked. Everything lines up.
And it's completely fake.
Across the country, cybercriminals are stealing the identities of legitimate recruiters to run cons on job seekers — extracting money, personal data, or both. What makes these scams different from the obvious ones is precisely what makes them dangerous: they're built from real information. Real names. Real profiles. Real job listings. The lies are tucked inside layers of truth.
Nick Russell spotted most of the fakes quickly after announcing his layoff from Epic Games on LinkedIn. Requests for money, offers to rewrite his résumé for a fee — he'd learned the signals. But two got through his defenses anyway. One pitched him on a senior art role at Blizzard. The job was real, the recruiter's name was real, and the pitch was entirely plausible given his background. He only caught it after reading a notice buried in Blizzard's careers page warning that authorized recruiters used specific email domains. His contacts didn't match.
The second scammer had a ready answer for every skeptical question Russell raised. A Gmail account? That was for confidential searches, to keep sensitive conversations out of the noise of a flooded inbox. Reasonable. Convincing. Wrong.
Russell eventually walked away — but only after the inevitable ask for résumé-revision fees. He's made a kind of peace with it. He'll keep responding to cold outreach because the alternative — shutting everything out — means missing real opportunities too.
That tension is exactly what scammers exploit.
Job hunting already scrapes at your confidence. You're questioning whether you're good enough, experienced enough, hireable enough. Then, at that exact low point, someone appears with an answer: yes, you are — we want you. The flattery lands hard. It's designed to.
The recruiters being impersonated are caught in their own bind. Some have stopped publicizing the scams, worried it'll make candidates distrust their real outreach. One recruiter quietly switched to using her maiden name professionally after her married name became associated with fraud. Another brace for the next wave — deepfake video interviews — that hasn't fully arrived yet but feels inevitable.
For now, the best defense is an uncomfortable one: treat good news with suspicion. Verify email domains. Contact recruiters through separate channels before trusting a message. And if something feels slightly off — an explanation that's just a little too smooth, a request that comes just a little too soon — trust that instinct.
The scam attempts, as Russell put it, are a bump in the road. But they're a bump that job seekers, already carrying enough, shouldn't have to navigate alone.