MW Fake job recruiters are getting smarter about scamming job seekers. AI is making it even worse.
Andrew Keshner
Scammers are spamming job candidates with emails and LinkedIn messages with offers that are too good to be true
"It's really hard to trust if any outreach is legitimate," said one job hunter.
Five months into his job search, Tyler Stahl hasn't contacted any recruiters, but they sure have contacted him - or people who claim to be recruiters.
Since June, Stahl's email inbox and LinkedIn messages have been filling up with unsolicited job opportunities. Many of the roles appear neatly suited to his work experience as an engineer in the tech sector who also has counseling experience. A good chunk seek out his exact education and counseling background, while the rest include direct matches to his technical skills.
Getting hired is a difficult process these days. Still, Stahl has ignored the pitches, which all seem "suspicious" and "too good to be true," he said.
"It's really hard to trust if any outreach is legitimate. It's really hard to know what to trust," he told MarketWatch. Sometimes, his two AI agents that brief him about which emails to focus on recommend he reply to the "recruiter" emails.
Late last month, Stahl received nine emails overnight floating job leads. The descriptions in two emails pulled lines directly from his LinkedIn profile. "That was a funny part I laughed at," he noted - but he still had to read them, just in case any seemed legitimate.
Like Stahl, Ashley Carr has no choice but to check the emails and messages she receives while looking for her next role in business development and marketing.
It's been years since her last job hunt, and Carr is learning how difficult the search is now - and how fakes and scammers seem more believable and prevalent. "I'm sure I got an email here or there, but never to this caliber," she said.
Carr looks for tip-offs, like if the roles seem laser-matched to her experience and the salaries are "incredible." If the pitch comes via LinkedIn, she checks if the profile image appears AI-generated. If it seems real, she checks the recruiter's profile for glaringly long times at one job and their posting activity.
"If you were at wit's end and you got this, and you didn't know the signs, I could easily see somebody just sending all their information and going, 'Please hire me,'" said Carr.
Many job hunts can erode a person's patience. The U.S. economy added an above-forecast 162,000 jobs last month - yet Americans were spending an average of six months unemployed, the data showed. There's a lot of pressure being unemployed when prices are high, gas is above $4 a gallon and economic uncertainty brews ahead of this fall's midterm elections.
Recruiting con jobs have been around for years in some form. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 130,000 reports of job scams and fraudulent employment agencies. Victims lost $643 million, up from $179 million in 2022, regulatory data show.
Job seekers are now contending with increasingly personalized traps, said James Lee, president of the Identity Resource Theft Center.
"This is a variation of a trend we have been tracking for more than a year," he said. Phony texts with offers for remote work emerged roughly two years ago, Lee noted. "Now, we are in the direct-solicitation stage," where scammers are "impersonating real recruiters to target real people directly," he added.
Lee received one such email earlier the same day. Though many bogus emails come from Gmail accounts, one giveaway was the mismatch between the email's domain address and the recruiting firm's internet domain address. The logos didn't match either.
Scammers can use publicly available career data on social-media sites or resumes posted on job sites as a resource, Lee said. If crooks have access to some of an individual's personal information, that's another way to sharpen the hook.
Quirky sentences, spelling errors and grammar mistakes used to be clues of overseas scams - but AI now makes the pitches sound conversational, Lee said. "There is no doubt AI is fueling both the volume and the sophistication of scams," he added.
Stahl still sees messages coming from Gmail accounts. Sometimes, the recruiter's name is different in the email address compared to the content. Nevertheless, the messages are usually error-free and professional-sounding.
Stahl says he's optimistic about AI's potential for good - that is, when it's used responsibly.
Marquis Brown always reports the job scams he encounters on LinkedIn and marks fishy emails for spam. He'll sometimes engage the scammers purposely. "The more time I'm spending wasting their time, they're probably not out there trying to look for other people," he said.
Several weeks ago, Brown listened to a supposed recruiter pitch a Florida property-management job that "seemed off because it was too perfect." Brown, based in Seattle, said the chat took place at 6 p.m. his time, which would have meant the recruiter was working at 9 p.m. their time.
In the chat, the recruiter sent Brown a check for a deposit to pay for equipment. Brown didn't bite: It was the hallmark of a "fake check" scam.
Another time, Brown said a scammer tried to direct him to a "background check" site where he would have forked over $30 and a boatload of valuable data.
If the con isn't about grabbing money upfront, Lee said scammers are playing the long game. Sometimes, they will try to open fraudulent loans and benefits posing as the person they're targeting. Other times, they will piece together information from different people to create a "synthetic identity," he said.
The key is exploiting job-seeker anxiety, he noted: "They want somebody who is in a hurry to find a job."
What can be done to fight scammers
Around half of job seekers say they are skeptical of most outreach they now receive, according to a Monster survey. It's another reminder of the diminishing trust in today's job market, like the questionable future of the cover letter.
Major job-search platforms say they are focused on what's phony and sowing mistrust.
"Online scams continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, and recruiting is no exception," said a LinkedIn spokesperson. The platform is still making investments to find fraud and has had a recruiter verification program since 2024.
"While most detected scam attempts are blocked before members ever see them, reports are important because they help our teams investigate patterns, enforce our policies and continue strengthening protections across the platform," the LinkedIn spokesperson said.
Even though most fake accounts are thwarted quickly, it's become a bigger job. LinkedIn stopped nearly 89 million fake accounts in the second half of 2025, data showed. In the second half of 2022 - during the dawn of ChatGPT - it blocked almost 45 million accounts. The platform recently added a "seems like AI slop" reporting option on posts, which more than 1 million people have already clicked.
At Indeed (JP:6098) $(RCRUY)$, a spokesperson said the job-search site is "aware of scams involving individuals falsely posing as 'Indeed recruiters' offering fake jobs in an attempt to gain money or request personal information. These are in no way affiliated with Indeed, and we strongly condemn bad actors who exploit the trust job seekers place in our platform and brand."
Here are some steps job seekers can take.
-- Watch for emails that don't end in a company's official web address.
-- Beware of "too good to be true" jobs with great perks and pay.
-- Expect employer interviews, yet be wary of interviews on chat apps. Asking to quickly talk outside of a LinkedIn chat, and beyond its reporting tools, would be a red flag. LinkedIn said around 90% of reported scam-attempt messages on the platform seek to take the talk to personal messaging apps where verification is difficult.
-- Don't pay to apply for a job.
Even when job seekers catch the scam, some still pay a tiny psychological price.
First is a jolt of excitement when seeing the subject line, and then comes disappointment, Carr said.
"You just kind of get annoyed and exhausted, because you think it's an opportunity and it really isn't," she said. "It's a little defeating."
-Andrew Keshner
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