Lying about position on resume but not about working at the company.

I’ve been navigating a difficult job search while trying to position myself for a move to Chicago this fall. During the process, I exaggerated part of my experience by listing an analyst position that I did not actually hold, when in reality I worked at a luxury resort in a customer-facing role. My only true internship experience was in wealth management, and that internship from last summer does not appear on The Work Number, which has made me anxious about background checks and employment verification. I recently graduated with a degree in Economics and have been applying aggressively to entry-level finance, analytics, and business roles, hoping for an opportunity that will allow me to start my career and relocate to Chicago. Despite setbacks and uncertainty, I’m continuing to apply, interview, and work toward building a legitimate path into the industry.

Jobadvisor

This is a stressful situation, and it's good that you're thinking carefully about it. Here's an honest breakdown:

The core risk you're facing

Listing a position you didn't hold — not just inflating a title, but claiming a role that didn't exist — is resume fraud. This is meaningfully different from stretching a job description. If discovered, it typically results in immediate disqualification or termination, even years later, and can follow you in a small industry like finance.

On the background check specifically

The Work Number doesn't capture everything, but background check firms use multiple sources — direct employer contact, state employment records, LinkedIn cross-referencing, and sometimes social media. The resort job is the bigger exposure point: if a verifier calls HR and asks about an "analyst" role, they'll either find no record of that title or get a correction.

What you should actually do

The honest path is also the safer one here:

Remove the fabricated title and list the resort role accurately. Customer-facing work at a luxury property has real transferable skills — client relations, service standards, handling high-net-worth guests — which actually does translate to wealth management adjacent roles.
Lead with the wealth management internship as your finance anchor, even if it's not on The Work Number. Offer a supervisor reference directly; that's often more convincing than a database hit anyway.
Frame your story honestly: recent Economics grad, wealth management internship, hospitality experience, relocating to Chicago for finance/analytics roles. That's a real, coherent narrative.

The harder truth

Entry-level finance is competitive, and the temptation to pad a resume is understandable. But finance and analytics are industries where background checks are thorough and professional networks are tight. Getting caught — now or two years into a job — is a much worse outcome than a slower, honest job search.

You're early enough in your career that the legitimate path, while harder right now, is genuinely the better one.

Laid off ONE WEEK into my new job

I went through FIVE rounds of interviews. Nailed them all. Got the job. I joined last Monday. Throughout the week I heard 2 other offers were on their way for related roles, but the plug was pulled at the last minute. I was "lucky" to have made it in before that. I was told there was some ominous all hands meeting that Thursday which would involve major changes.

Yesterday I was laid off because "restructure".

One. Week. In.

My previous job laid me off the day I was going to put in my 2 weeks. Now in an odd way I'm glad they did because I would've left a steady job for my new one then ended up with no job at all and that would've been my fault.

I have no words. I can't express how angry I am that the US has no labor protection laws with the exception of discrimination, which you have to hire a lawyer and prove in court.

Normally I'd be an ugly-crying-mess right now, but I'm so used to the barbaric treatment of employees in any field that I'm just numb. And that's sad.

Sending empathy, compassion and support to everyone who has gone through this or other forms of "recruiting hell". It's awful out here.

Jobadvisor

That is genuinely brutal. One week. After five rounds of interviews. The emotional whiplash of that alone would flatten most people.

The detail that gets me is that they knew — they knew restructuring was coming when they were still interviewing you, possibly when they extended the offer. And they let you go through all of it anyway. That's not just bad luck, that's a failure of basic decency on their part.

And the thing you said about being numb instead of crying — that's not weakness, that's what happens when a system fails people repeatedly enough. Your nervous system learned to protect you. It makes complete sense, and you're right that it's also genuinely sad that it had to.

The silver lining you mentioned is real, even if it feels hollow right now: you didn't burn your previous job to get here. You still have your record, your references, your reputation intact. They can't take that. The five rounds of interviews you crushed? You'll crush them again, and this time for a company that actually has its house in order.

What are you doing for yourself today? Sometimes after something like this the most important thing is just getting through the next few hours.

Job search question: am I being scammed?!?? Help!!!

TL;DR - I've been sent a job req via email, and some things about it are just... off... even if extremely subtle..

So, the other day, a recruiter from some company emailed me asking me if I'm interested in learning more about "time sensitive" open positions from there end. The email seemed really convincing at first, except I did note that the opening paragraph to their email basically summarized my LinkedIn profile in the way ChatGPT would. So I figured that they got my email and qualifications just by mass scanning a number of LinkedIn profiles, and then spammed emails accordingly.

I responded to the email in the affirmative, saying I was interested in learning about their open roles, and even attached my resume in the email. The next day, I get an email response back from them, except this time, something is "off" about it. The email from this company isn't as polished as their first one, it had typos and grammatical errors in it. They thanked me for sending them my resume, and said they would send me a job description of one of their open reqs even though they said they would have already done so in their introductory email. Additionally, this recruiter also said a member of the hiring team for this position would reach out to me for next steps even though I haven't actually spoken to the recruiter via phone/Zoom/Teams as of yet.

It was not even an hour later when I get another email from this company, this time with the job req. I open it, and something seems really off. The company sent me a job description that is largely the qualifications from my resume and LinkedIn profile having been rewritten in the format that you would expect for a job posting, eerily matching some key words from my resume to a high degree. The salary range for the position is significantly above market value (to the scale of almost hundreds of thousands above what it normally would be). But most of all, what stood out to me is that this job description says that the position would be located in the city I am based out of even though this company does not have an office in my area.

The thing is, I researched this company, and it does have fully functional LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and CrunchBase profiles. However, something about the emails from this company just seems off. They use "gmail.com" as their email domain name, vs some actually professional listing that follows the company's name. And whereas the first email felt almost too clean (like it was written by ChatGPT), the last two that were sent in rapid succession were either tonally or grammatically different. But at the same time, everything else (besides the salary range being abnormally high and the job description seemingly being lifted from my resume) seems "normal."

Am I right to be suspicious of this? This company claims to be FINRA/SIPC associated, but I don't know if someone is impersonating this company. What should I do at this point? I'm worried that this is some kind of scam, based off of how "convenient" some of these points are.

Jobadvisor

Your instincts are right — this has multiple hallmarks of a job scam. Let me break down the red flags and what to do.

The red flags you've identified are serious:

Gmail domain is the biggest one. Any legitimate company recruiter uses a corporate email (e.g. @companyname.com). No exceptions for a real hiring process.
Job description mirroring your resume is a classic scam tactic — they build a fake "perfect fit" role to hook you emotionally.
Salary wildly above market is a textbook lure. Scammers know inflated numbers bypass skepticism.
No office in your city but the role is listed there anyway — incoherent.
Inconsistent email quality strongly suggests multiple people (or bots + a human) are involved, not a real internal team.
Skipping the phone screen and rushing to next steps is a pressure tactic to move fast before you think too hard.

What's likely happening: Someone found your LinkedIn, used your profile to craft a personalized lure, and is impersonating a real, legitimate-looking company (hence the LinkedIn/Glassdoor/CrunchBase presence — those are easy to copy or already exist for a real company being impersonated). The goal is usually one of a few things: get you to fill out a fake "onboarding" form to steal personal info (SSN, bank account for "direct deposit"), send you a fake check and ask you to forward funds, or get you to pay for "background checks" or "equipment."

What to do:

Do not send any more personal information. You've already sent your resume, which is unfortunate but not catastrophic — it's info that's largely on LinkedIn anyway.
Verify independently. Go directly to the company's real website (find it yourself, don't click any links from the emails) and call or email their HR/recruiting department directly. Ask if this recruiter works there.
Check FINRA's BrokerCheck at brokercheck.finra.org — if they claim FINRA association, the firm and any registered individuals should be searchable there. A mismatch is confirmation of impersonation.
Report it. You can report impersonation to the real company (they want to know), to LinkedIn if a fake profile is involved, and to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov.
Do not engage further with the original email chain. If it is a scam, continued engagement just signals you're a responsive target.

Your gut was correct the whole time. The first email being suspiciously polished while the follow-ups were sloppy is very telling — the first was likely a mass AI-generated opener, and then a human scammer took over manually once you responded.