Recruitment Scams
Learn about Recruitment Scams on Linkedin particularly concerning Engineers in the Web3/Blockchain/Crypto space
By Jeffrey Li
Thank you for being a valued user on Paraform! Recently, we’ve seen that many recruiters/companies have been affected by an ongoing Recruitment Scam on LinkedIn particularly concerning Engineers in the Web3/Blockchain/Crypto space.
To sum it up, offshore developer agencies will create fake profiles while a real person operates the account by responding to emails and attending phone interviews.They are essentially abusing the recruiting industry since recruiters send outbound messages to every candidate.
In order to prevent this from wasting your time, we’ve gathered some data points that might be useful. Here are some attributes that are typically found in LinkedIn profiles that are apart of the scam:
- Asian candidates with White names such as; Jeremy Taylor or David Thompson. The tricky part is they could also have an Asian American name on Linkedin so you have to look at the bottom bullet points holistically.
- Unpopular cities on LinkedIn profile such as Duvall, Washington, United States or Smithtown, New York, United States (sometimes could be popular cities!)
- Mix of contract/full-time work in random companies (with less that 100 followers on Linkedin)
- Usually in Web3 and blockchain
- Overseas universities such as; National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Technology, University of Osaka and Kyoto
- Little to no activity on LinkedIn with low number of connections
- They usually have one or two posts saying “Hey LinkedIn! I'm looking for a new job #opentowork” etc.
Here are some examples of profiles to help you identify similar ones in the future:
Below are some example scam profiles with the same pattern:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-chan-6b3a2a24b/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-chan-b51498252/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-west-a8b42723a/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/willie-lee-4aa55a1b7/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jovanni-llewellyn/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-taylor-53b871248/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-wengel-276392208/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-w-411184211/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-lee-thinking/
We want to prevent you from wasting time on candidates who will not get hired by the startups on our platform. Usually, these candidates get past the screening stage (resume, LinkedIn, GitHub) because they can generate a good profile by using software, but will always get rejected by the companies in later interview stages.
It may be even more confusing because there is a real person operating this account coming on your screening calls (sometimes with video on) and they have a script they read out in the screening call.
We actually added spam filters on our platform to detect these recruitment scams and auto-reject these candidates in case you miss them.
If you have any questions please email john@paraform.com!