Scammers create fake jobs in the name of IT companies to get candidates’ money

S-PRO, a fintech software-developing company, detected suspicious activity on LinkedIn and other job platforms. For example, some unknown users created lucrative job openings in the company’s name and asked candidates to provide their personal data or even money. AIN.Capital asked the company reps about the details of this story.

• How did the company discover suspicious activity on its LinkedIn account and other job platforms? First, there was a job opening on LinkedIn with a different description than on its official website. LinkedIn marked it as “imported from an external resource.” It looked suspicious, but the team couldn’t find out the origin of this vacancy. So it was deleted.
• Sometime later, the recruiter Olena Starushko discovered many fake accounts created in the company’s name on a Ukrainian job website. But she couldn’t remove them:

“On that day, as usual, I had opened the company profile to check if there were new job openings and requests. But then I was shocked to see a ton of unknown vacancies — all on a high level and specified for Polish candidates. Moreover, all of them were created from an account with my name. The worst was that I couldn’t edit them. There was my name, but the account wasn’t mine,” she explained.

Examples of the fake job ads:

• Olena reached the S-PRO Chief of Recruiting, and the fake jobs were deleted then. Scammers seemed to find security vulnerabilities in mentioned job platforms. They used Olena’s personal data from LinkedIn and her corporate email and registered an account with a close domain: @s-pro.us (instead of the real @s-pro.io).
• At that time, the fraudsters not only published vacancies (with attractive terms for foreign candidates) but had already started negotiating with “potential employees” to scam them for money or personal data:

“Their goal was to make an excellent job offer and then ask to buy specific expensive equipment by specific sellers, namely their accomplices (for example, purchase a computer that the candidate would never receive) or pay for visa processing since all jobs were designed for foreigners. They also can require your banking details in order to pay you a salary,” the company reps resumed.

• Even after the company deleted all the fake jobs, Olena Starushko continued to receive messages from developers interested in these positions. Moreover, the candidates were surprised that they could not write to the recruiter in the previous chat.
• The company’s team discovered that they weren’t the only ones who encountered such a scam: for example, fraudsters have scammed candidates out of thousands of dollars by hiding behind the Sigma Software name. The company Avenga has posted a guide about such fraudulent schemes and the signs that should alert a candidate when applying for a job.