This 39-year-old job-seeker is hunting down fake job ads and the scammers behind them.
This isn’t the premise of a superhero movie — it’s everyday life for Jay Jones, a 39-year-old Chicago-based resident who spends hours daily tracking down fake job ads and fraudulent recruiters on job boards. Jones is an out-of-work copywriter who now spends his time hunting down the plethora of scams targeting job-seekers like himself. In his spare time, he drives for Uber.
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Jones has found nearly 60,000 fake job postings, primarily on LinkedIn, and helped get them removed. Late-night sleuthing has become essential to his campaign. He told the Journal that in these sessions, he has identified about 7,000 fraudulent recruiter profiles, many designed to steer unsuspecting job-seekers toward fake job openings that impersonate legitimate employers.
“It’s like rabbit hole after rabbit hole,” Jones told the Journal.
The fake accounts serve as a human facade for the listings. They use stolen identities and copied photos to draw applicants into sharing sensitive information.
For example, Jones recently encountered a recruiter on LinkedIn named Linda Anthony. He did some searching and found a handful of profiles with the same name.
The accounts looked polished at first glance, complete with friendly headshots and recruiter-style bios. But Jones spotted a revealing pattern: They used the same image for a profile picture, appeared on LinkedIn around the same time and carried nearly identical strings of letters and numbers at the end of their profile URLs.
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