On the Clock: Scammers Are Stealing Recruiters' Identities --- Cybercriminals find new ways to take advantage of job hunters

“The email lights up your inbox like a ray of hope. A headhunter has identified you as a strong candidate for a job opening. The message shows familiarity with your resume, and it bears the signature of a real recruiter -- complete with a hyperlink to a legitimate LinkedIn profile.

 

For all that, it's a scam.

 

Cybercriminals are stealing recruiters' identities to hustle job seekers out of money or personal data. These ploys can be convincing because they involve a lot of genuine information and avoid many of the red flags we're used to looking for.

 

Most of us know better than to fall for those text messages advertising remote positions with flexible hours that pay up to $3,000 a day. We're suspicious of emails written in broken English and direct messages from social-media accounts that were created yesterday.

 

But fraudsters are growing more sophisticated and harder to detect.

 

"It's constantly happening, and now the scammers are getting really good at it," says Sarah Englade, founder of Monarch Talent Solutions in Houston, who has been impersonated several times.

 

She finds out about these hoaxes when job seekers call to follow up on overtures they received from "Sarah Englade." Then she has to break the bad news.

 

Some people forward the bogus emails to the real Englade. She says it's striking how real they seem. Englade is active on LinkedIn and Instagram, which she suspects makes her a target for impersonation.

 

Job seekers, too, say a robust online presence cuts both ways. Posting about layoffs or placing GBP opentowork banners on profile pictures can make them more visible to recruiters. The same moves tend to attract scammers who take advantage of people when they are most vulnerable.

 

For Nick Russell, the stream of dubious recruiting pitches started as soon as he wrote on LinkedIn that he was among the more than 1,000 people let go by Epic Games last month.

 

He sniffed out most of the fakes right away. A telltale sign, in many, was a request for money or an offer to rewrite his resume for a fee.

 

Even messages like these, which seem sketchy, can be difficult to vet because "reverse recruiting" is a thing now.

 

Businesses typically pay recruiters to fill openings. But in a cooling labor market, some job hunters have started offering finder's fees to recruiters who can place them in new roles.

 

Despite having his antenna up, Russell says he was initially taken in by a couple of phony outreaches. He took screenshots and shared them with me.

 

One email said he was a fit for a senior art-production role at Blizzard Entertainment. It was plausible, given his background in videogames.

 

The job was real -- he checked Blizzard's careers page. The emailer's claim that "this search is being executed via direct headhunting" made sense because hiring managers are often flooded with low-quality applications.

 

Russell figured out the ruse after reading a warning on the Blizzard website, which said authorized recruiters would use only certain email extensions. The address of the person who contacted him didn't match.

 

A second message, signed with the name and LinkedIn profile of a real recruiter, came from a Gmail account. When Russell questioned this, the sender was ready with an explanation: The private email address was supposedly for confidential searches, "ensuring these sensitive conversations don't get buried in the thousands of emails that hit my primary inbox daily."

 

Russell kept up the correspondence until he was asked to pay for resume revisions. He has accepted that this might not be the last time he gets temporarily duped because he doesn't want to let wariness get in the way of authentic opportunities.

 

"I'll probably still respond to cold-call messages that come through," he says. "The scam attempts feel like a bump in the road that I just have to deal with."

 

The scale of these recruiter-impersonation scams is hard to measure, but it is likely bigger than it appears. Recruiters who have had their identities stolen often don't want to publicize the episodes.

 

I recently received an email similar to the ones aimed at Russell. Through a different channel, I contacted the recruiter whose name was attached and told her she was being impersonated. She said it wasn't the first time but declined to be interviewed.

 

Frustrated job hunters sometimes post in online forums the recruiters' names that have been used in scams. It's an attempt to warn others, but it can make the real recruiters' jobs harder.

 

One told me she has started using her maiden name professionally because her married name was used in a scam. She worries that candidates won't respond to her messages if she uses it.

 

Job seekers also deal with the shame of being faked out, especially if they turned over money.

 

Career coach Gina Riley has been impersonated several times and sometimes finds herself consoling people who falsely believed she contacted them with a golden opportunity. She says one man felt embarrassed after exchanging more than 20 emails with an impostor.

 

Riley worries about deepfake video interviews taking job scams to another level.

 

"I have not seen that yet, but I'm public enough that someone could probably steal my face and voice," she says.

 

As if job hunting wasn't hard enough.

 

Looking for work already involves doubts about whether we are good enough for open roles. On top of that, we now have to be on guard at one of the most vulnerable moments of our careers.” [1]

 

1. On the Clock: Scammers Are Stealing Recruiters' Identities --- Cybercriminals find new ways to take advantage of job hunters. Borchers, Callum.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Apr 2026: A12.