Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017
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It's the same process, but not as common - but almost, as why bots are used on Tinder and other dating sites. They make personal profiles that are just like these job listings - clearly nonsensical and casually obvious as being so, in the hopes that people either desperate and willing to take any risk or blindly responding to anything and everything will send in some data that they can collect. It's a standard data collection model and the two things, job postings and online dating, are nearly identical in both how and why they do it. Just different pools of data.
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@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
An actual company wants to fill an actual role. The job posting is real.
What's fake is the title and duties of the job role.
No, we have zero reason to believe that. There is some chance that there is an actually company, some lesser chance that there is an actual role, even less chance that there are two and less still that they are the roles or descriptions listed.
Is it possible that this is real? Sure. Is it reasonable in the real world? Not in the least.
There is essentially zero possibility that both roles even exist.
Is it even legal to post fake jobs to collect personal info?
Yes. Perfectly legal.
Well if that's true, I see no reason then to believe it's real either.
It's extremely common and I've caught firms like this admitting to it in arguments when tempers flared and they got emotional and forgot what not to say.
What's the point of doing that? Getting email addresses and phone numbers to sell to spam lists?
To see what types of listings get bites in order to more acturately make listings for lower numbers than the companies are hiring for so that the contracting company can get bigger cuts.
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@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
An actual company wants to fill an actual role. The job posting is real.
What's fake is the title and duties of the job role.
No, we have zero reason to believe that. There is some chance that there is an actually company, some lesser chance that there is an actual role, even less chance that there are two and less still that they are the roles or descriptions listed.
Is it possible that this is real? Sure. Is it reasonable in the real world? Not in the least.
There is essentially zero possibility that both roles even exist.
Is it even legal to post fake jobs to collect personal info?
Yes. Perfectly legal.
Well if that's true, I see no reason then to believe it's real either.
It's extremely common and I've caught firms like this admitting to it in arguments when tempers flared and they got emotional and forgot what not to say.
What's the point of doing that? Getting email addresses and phone numbers to sell to spam lists?
Yes. Or generating market data. Can be sold to marketing companies to show which people are easily tricked, that's incredibly valuable info. Or, as I've seen on more targeted attacks, doing it to collect potential people today so that firms can use that pool to go after real jobs in the future. That's the most common, I assume, approach.
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@jaredbusch said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@jaredbusch said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
By the way, I sent my "how to spot a fake job posting" to them with a note about how there is no way they didn't know this was fake when they sent it to me. They declined to respond. My guess is that if it was real, they'd have wanted to defend themselves given that CyberCoders is large and doesn't want people thinking that they are faking these to collect data.
It was sent out by a bot that is not programmed to see replies.
Eventually some low paid, likely off-shored, schmuck will see it and delete it without reading it because it does not meet valid response criteria.
Doesn't sending out emails as a person asking for a response and turning out to be a bot that black holes that data or collects it to just collect data indicate that this is that much more fake?
Who said anything about black holing data or collecting just to collect.
I said it was sent by a bot. That does not mean the response is black holed.
I said deleted because it does not contain valid response criteria. That does not mean that it is collecting to collect. It simply means it did not contain a response meeting a typical job seeker and the Script Monkey simply deletes it instead of forwarding it back to the Boss or whatever protocol CyberCoders uses for responses.
You said programmed to not see replies. If it doesn't see it, that's black holing.
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@jaredbusch said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@tim_g said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
An actual company wants to fill an actual role. The job posting is real.
What's fake is the title and duties of the job role.
No, we have zero reason to believe that. There is some chance that there is an actually company, some lesser chance that there is an actual role, even less chance that there are two and less still that they are the roles or descriptions listed.
Is it possible that this is real? Sure. Is it reasonable in the real world? Not in the least.
There is essentially zero possibility that both roles even exist.
Is it even legal to post fake jobs to collect personal info?
Yes. Perfectly legal.
Well if that's true, I see no reason then to believe it's real either.
It's extremely common and I've caught firms like this admitting to it in arguments when tempers flared and they got emotional and forgot what not to say.
What's the point of doing that? Getting email addresses and phone numbers to sell to spam lists?
To see what types of listings get bites in order to more acturately make listings for lower numbers than the companies are hiring for so that the contracting company can get bigger cuts.
That's the "business intelligence" side of it. Definitely one of the things that they do. Generate profiles of "what makes people react." It's basically marketing research.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@jaredbusch said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@jaredbusch said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
By the way, I sent my "how to spot a fake job posting" to them with a note about how there is no way they didn't know this was fake when they sent it to me. They declined to respond. My guess is that if it was real, they'd have wanted to defend themselves given that CyberCoders is large and doesn't want people thinking that they are faking these to collect data.
It was sent out by a bot that is not programmed to see replies.
Eventually some low paid, likely off-shored, schmuck will see it and delete it without reading it because it does not meet valid response criteria.
Doesn't sending out emails as a person asking for a response and turning out to be a bot that black holes that data or collects it to just collect data indicate that this is that much more fake?
Who said anything about black holing data or collecting just to collect.
I said it was sent by a bot. That does not mean the response is black holed.
I said deleted because it does not contain valid response criteria. That does not mean that it is collecting to collect. It simply means it did not contain a response meeting a typical job seeker and the Script Monkey simply deletes it instead of forwarding it back to the Boss or whatever protocol CyberCoders uses for responses.
You said programmed to not see replies. If it doesn't see it, that's black holing.
Not as long as the mailbox is read by something it is not. I simply said the bot that sent does not also parse responses.
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https://mangolassi.it/topic/15018/why-collecting-job-hunter-lists-are-useful-to-recruiters
This helps to explain the economics.
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What's funny is that I pointed out to the recruiter that this was obviously fake. Then they accidentally had some respond to me that they were blocking me. No conversation, nothing. Just blocked me. Which tells me they know exactly what they are doing and felt better to shut off communications than to risk further exposure.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
What's funny is that I pointed out to the recruiter that this was obviously fake. Then they accidentally had some respond to me that they were blocking me. No conversation, nothing. Just blocked me. Which tells me they know exactly what they are doing and felt better to shut off communications than to risk further exposure.
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Scott, are you saying people are putting job adverts online with the intention of not hiring people, just scavenging contact information for $purposes? Is this what you mean by fake, or are you claiming that since SMB hiring people dont know IT their job adverts appear fake?
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@momurda said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
Scott, are you saying people are putting job adverts online with the intention of not hiring people, just scavenging contact information for $purposes? Is this what you mean by fake, or are you claiming that since SMB hiring people dont know IT their job adverts appear fake?
From what I understood, both.
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@momurda said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
Scott, are you saying people are putting job adverts online with the intention of not hiring people, just scavenging contact information for $purposes? Is this what you mean by fake, or are you claiming that since SMB hiring people dont know IT their job adverts appear fake?
I mean fake in the broad sense - anything that is intentionally lying to offer one job and not intend to provide it. So could be that the job isn't the one listed, it's a bait and switch or, as you say, a majority is likely collecting information to use in some questionable way.
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@momurda said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
... or are you claiming that since SMB hiring people dont know IT their job adverts appear fake?
This might be the case, but APPEARING fake and BEING fake isn't the same. In this case, I'm 100% sure the job is fake. Especially after I pointed it out and they blocked me instead of explaining. Running completely fake ads to collect data, get workers on the line or similar is super common, to the point of being the vast majority of postings. We can't prove any specific ad is fake, but there are really handy tell tale signs and this one is over the top.
It's true that many legitimate SMB job postings might appear fake, but make are actually fake, too. Faking SMB jobs are less risky than faking big enterprise ones in many cases.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@momurda said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
... or are you claiming that since SMB hiring people dont know IT their job adverts appear fake?
This might be the case, but APPEARING fake and BEING fake isn't the same. In this case, I'm 100% sure the job is fake. Especially after I pointed it out and they blocked me instead of explaining. Running completely fake ads to collect data, get workers on the line or similar is super common, to the point of being the vast majority of postings. We can't prove any specific ad is fake, but there are really handy tell tale signs and this one is over the top.
It's true that many legitimate SMB job postings might appear fake, but make are actually fake, too. Faking SMB jobs are less risky than faking big enterprise ones in many cases.
Well, you could always point them to your long lost rich uncle in Nigeria. Hook them up with his email and info!
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@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
It's the belief that all job postings are real that leads people to think that all jobs require degrees, that ancient outdated skills are the only ones used, that IT pay is a fraction of what it is. Companies and recruiting firms make big money from fake job postings.
Assuming Scott's assertion is correct, then I would agree with this.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
they can collect. It's a standard data collection model and the two things, job postings and online dating, are nearly identical in
We need a new thread where Scott posts fake job postings and his replies (when they reply) about them being fake.
This would also explain why there appears to be so few actual jobs out there - at least so few actually hiring. Like email in general - according to Scott, something like xyz% of jobs listed are fake, I'm guessing it's a huge percentage.
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@dashrender said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
@scottalanmiller said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
they can collect. It's a standard data collection model and the two things, job postings and online dating, are nearly identical in
We need a new thread where Scott posts fake job postings and his replies (when they reply) about them being fake.
This would also explain why there appears to be so few actual jobs out there - at least so few actually hiring. Like email in general - according to Scott, something like xyz% of jobs listed are fake, I'm guessing it's a huge percentage.
Exactly. It creates this feeling that no one is hiring, which is kind of true. There are places hiring, only so many of them use these services, many do not. There is no central clearing house for work. Then it makes everyone in the industry feel like they are not desirable, often because they just apply to fake jobs over and over again and never get a response. In most cases, like this one, the person to whom I responded, never responded. That happens constantly. There is no "person" on the other end of the email.
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Saw a good one today on ZipRecruiter:
Continuous Improvement Manager
Hiring Company Seattle, WA USAYeah, I'll get right on that....
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@travisdh1 said in Spot the Fake Job Postings, Labor Day 2017:
Saw a good one today on ZipRecruiter:
Continuous Improvement Manager
Hiring Company Seattle, WA USAYeah, I'll get right on that....
Is it a manager of continuous improvement, or an improvement manager who has been doing it continuously?
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@travisdh1 Could be Valve with a title like that.
