Following a significant wave of tech layoffs, the popular professional networking platform LinkedIn has been targeted by sophisticated recruitment scams. These scams involve fraudulent job offers being made to recently laid-off individuals, offering them positions that do not actually exist.
Because of big tech and other organisations’ uncertain global macroeconomic conditions, thousands have lost their jobs.
As per the Financial Times, the scammers are running these phoney recruitments by impersonating the employers.
Oscar Rodriguez, VP, product management, LinkedIn, stated that the scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with scammers creating websites, using professional-sounding phone operators, and resorting to more advanced deception techniques.
To combat the surge in job-related scams, LinkedIn has been working to eliminate tens of millions of fake profiles over the past several months, in line with warnings from regulators.
Recently, cyber security firm Zscaler detailed a scam in which fraudsters approached job seekers through LinkedIn’s direct messaging feature, InMail.
Deepen Desai, VP of security research, Zscaler, said that the fraudsters have also created Skype profiles with the picture of the real recruiter from the companies to conduct interviews.
In their latest tactics, scammers are utilising artificial intelligence (AI) as well to generate profile pictures that are convincing enough to deceive human perception. According to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), there were over 92,000 business and job-related scams in 2022, resulting in a loss of $367.4 million.
