10 tell-tale signs of fake recruiters on LinkedIn

There have been an increasing number of instances recently, relayed by the members of our Oil and Gas Careers Forum, of fake recruiters trying to obtain LinkedIn users’ sensitive information by sending out bogus job offers.

This spike in fraudulent activity can largely be explained by the turbulent period that our sector is experiencing, although these criminals can be found on LinkedIn all year round, professing to be experts in every industry.

 

These fraudsters are by no means restricted to LinkedIn – they can also be found across Twitter and Facebook – however because of the unique nature of LinkedIn, whereby you often find yourself connecting with people you don’t know personally, the network proves particularly fertile ground for this sort of behaviour.

Some of these scams are very sophisticated, and are carried out by professional crime syndicates from around the world. In October 2015, researchers from Dell’s counter-threat unit discovered a network of at least 25 fake profiles that had links to over 200 legitimate ones, belonging to people working in defence, telecommunications, government and utilities. The fake accounts were linked back to an Iran-based hacker group, BBC reported.

Symantec, who conducted a study into fake LinkedIn profiles, found that they usually displayed very similar characteristics:

• They bill themselves as recruiters for fake firms or are supposedly self employed
• They primarily use photos of women pulled from stock image sites or of real professionals
• They copy text from profiles of real professionals and paste it into their own
• They keyword-stuff their profile for visibility in search results

What to look for?

It’s important that you familiarise yourself with the below tell-tale signs of these fake recruiters, so you don’t end up compromising your personal information or disclosing your bank details.

Some of these impostors are particularly hard to identify, as they will often use the company name of a real and well-known recruitment company; Hays have had to deal with many phony profiles which deceitfully claim that that person works for our business.

Never assume that someone who appears to work for a major recruitment group, and whose profile is linked to the corporate page of that company, is in fact an employee. There is no verification process on LinkedIn for checking that somebody actually works for the organisation that they claim to – you can claim to work for any employer you wish. If in doubt, assume that somebody isn’t who they say they are.

Hopefully you won’t have to assume, however, as there are many obvious, tell-tale indicators of a fake recruiter’s page – here are ten of them:

1. They have a LinkedIn profile which has a low amount of connections

2. They have large amounts of information missing on their profile

3. They spell ‘jobs’ as ‘j0bs’ on their LinkedIn profile, or they use a picture with the text ‘jobs’, so they’re able to circumnavigate the LinkedIn filter

4. They feature a free email address on their LinkedIn profile (e.g. @gmail.com or @live.com)

5. They offer you the job without so much as a phone interview

6. They send you a job offer letter which looks unprofessional; bright imagery and font are frequent red flags

7. The job offer doesn’t detail the skills required, or specifies basic skills

8. They ask you to make a payment

9. They offer you a lot more money than you know the position to be worth (you can check the typical salary for a role using Hays Salary Guide)

10. They seem a little over-eager to seal the deal

What can you do?

If after running the profile through the above checklist you’re still unsure as to whether that person is who they say they are then there are some further and fuller steps you can take, summarised by the below ‘three Rs’.

Research

If the person is contacting you from a free email address, then ask them to resend the job offer via their corporate email. Any professional recruiter would understand entirely and be happy to do so.

You can also run a scan on their ‘company website’. Some fraudsters put together authentic-looking websites, so that they can then have an email address which uses the domain name. Research their site and see if it appears on anti-scamming websites such as scamwarners.com, or whether it’s been flagged by either bbb.org or ftc.gov.

I also highly recommend copying and pasting both the alleged recruiter’s profile picture and description into Google to verify their claims. This is a good way of assessing whether theirs is a duplicate or another, authentic profile.

Most importantly, never open any attachments sent via email until you have confirmed the veracity of that person’s claims. Many attachments sent from anonymous sources contain malicious viruses which can corrupt your computer and steal your personal information.

Review

It might be a good idea, whether you’ve been contacted by a suspicious person or not, to review your LinkedIn privacy settings. The easiest way to avoid scammers is to make yourself less visible using this feature. The most important setting you need is ‘Who can send you invitations’ (which you will find in the ‘Communications’ tab under ‘Privacy Settings’). Another way to avoid fraudsters is to specify that you’re unwilling to receive any mail relating to ‘career opportunities’ or ‘new ventures’, which you can also do under LinkedIn’s ‘Privacy Settings’.

Report

The wise thing to do once you have identified someone as a fake recruiter is to report them to LinkedIn, and bring their illicit practices to an end. LinkedIn are very proactive in detecting and blocking scammers.

If you come across a suspicious looking LinkedIn profile, which you believe could be a fake recruiter then you can – on their profile page – select ‘Block or report’ under the blue ‘Send a message’ drop-down button. LinkedIn will then notify you that, “This person will be submitted for review. We’ll look for inappropriate behaviour or violations of our Terms of Use. Choose this option if you think this member’s behaviour is bad for the LinkedIn community”.

LinkedIn have the following to say on false profiles: “We have a number of measures in place to confirm [the] authenticity of profiles and remove those that are fake. We encourage members to utilise our Help Centre to report inaccurate profiles and specific profile content to LinkedIn”.

Sifting through the scammers

You may be struggling to find employment in your sector, but it’s important that you remain patient and vigilant so you do not end up being duped by scheming fraudsters. Heed the above advice each time you are contacted with a job offer and you will be fine.

If you have any questions on anything covered above, or want to share an oil and gas scam-related experience, then please come and join our oil and gas community on LinkedIn here.

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