Employment Fraud

May 21, 2021

How to Tell a Job Offer from an ID Theft Trap

This post was originally published on this siteOne of the oldest scams around — the fake job interview that seeks only to harvest your personal and financial data — is on the rise, the FBI warns. Here’s the story of a recent LinkedIn impersonation scam that led to more than 100 people getting duped, and one almost-victim who decided the job offer was too-good-to-be-true. Last week, someone began began posting classified notices on LinkedIn for different design consulting jobs at Geosyntec Consultants, an environmental engineering firm based in the Washington, D.C. area. Those who responded were told their application for […]
June 20, 2022

Why Paper Receipts are Money at the Drive-Thru

This post was originally published on this siteCheck out this handmade sign posted to the front door of a shuttered Jimmy John’s sandwich chain shop in Missouri last week. See if you can tell from the store owner’s message what happened. If you guessed that someone in the Jimmy John’s store might have fallen victim to a Business Email Compromise (BEC) or “CEO fraud” scheme — wherein the scammers impersonate company executives to steal money — you’d be in good company. In fact, that was my initial assumption when a reader in Missouri shared this photo after being turned away […]
July 21, 2022

Massive Losses Define Epidemic of ‘Pig Butchering’

This post was originally published on this siteU.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as “pig butchering,” wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out. The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, […]
October 20, 2022

Battle with Bots Prompts Mass Purge of Amazon, Apple Employee Accounts on LinkedIn

This post was originally published on this siteOn October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users. Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor […]