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He calls himself \u201cThe Profiler.\u201d Recruitment scammers call him a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the premise of a superhero movie \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s everyday life for Jay Jones<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to a recent report<\/a> from The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, 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<\/em> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like rabbit hole after rabbit hole,\u201d Jones told the Journal<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n To him, those repeating digital fingerprints suggested the profiles had been spun up in batches, not by real recruiters. Once deployed, the accounts could blast messages to job-seekers at scale, using fake opportunities to harvest personal details or persuade targets to hand over money.<\/p>\n Many Americans are facing prolonged job hunts, making an already stressful process harder and them more vulnerable to fraud. In August, 1.9 million people had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks, about six months, and they represented 27% of all unemployed workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That share was near its highest level in more than a decade.<\/p>\n LinkedIn says it is increasingly relying on automated, AI-driven defenses to intercept fraudulent activity before it reaches users. The company told the Journal<\/em> that its systems proactively block 99.5% of fake accounts it detects and remove 98.7% of identified scam and spam content before members see it. In the second half of 2025, LinkedIn said it stopped nearly 90 million fake accounts before they became active.<\/p>\n The site also recently introduced a \u201cseems like AI slop\u201d button that users press to flag AI-generated content. <\/p>\n However, Jones argues that scammers are adapting just as rapidly. He says automated recruiter personas such as \u201cLinda Anthony\u201d can use AI to make outreach sound tailored to an applicant\u2019s work history. He said that bringing these profiles to light is one way to combat their influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou turn the lights on and the roaches run,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n He calls himself \u201cThe Profiler.\u201d Recruitment scammers call him a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the premise of a superhero movie \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s everyday life for Jay Jones<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\nTurning the lights on<\/h2>\n
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