自己还在找工作，他已帮领英撤下近六万个假职位

A smiling woman wants to hire you.

Her name is Linda Anthony, and her title on LinkedIn is contract recruiter.

But a man named Jay Jones is convinced she's a bot account trying to scam you.

Jay says he first saw her one night just after midnight.

Her company was called "Confidential Jobs", based in a small town in Georgia.

He soon found her "clone": another Linda Anthony, same company, this time in California.

Then three more popped up.

The five accounts used the same photo, had all been created recently, and their profile links ended in the same string of letters and numbers.

To Jay, that was proof they had been made in bulk.

If these smiling faces sent out mass messages, job seekers' hard-earned savings — even their identities — could be stolen.

For Jay, it was just another Tuesday.

He lives near Chicago, calls himself "The Profiler", and spends hours every day wading through this online sludge.

He's an out-of-work copywriter who is job-hunting himself, while also hunting down the scams that target job seekers.

By his count, he has tracked nearly 60,000 fake jobs and helped get them pulled from the internet, most on LinkedIn and some on the job site Teal.

Often working into the early hours, he has reported about 7,000 scam accounts, many of them funneling job seekers to those fake jobs.

He says: it's like rabbit hole after rabbit hole.

Between all this, he also drives for a ride-hailing app to earn money.

American job seekers are increasingly frustrated with recruitment fraud, and increasingly desperate.

In August, people unemployed for more than six months made up 27% of all the unemployed — near the highest level in over a decade, outside the pandemic years.

LinkedIn says its AI systems clear out almost all scams before members — or Jay — ever see them.

The company says that in the second half of 2025 alone, nearly 90 million fake accounts were stopped before going live.

This summer, LinkedIn also teamed up with the FBI to teach job seekers how to spot scams.

Jay says bot accounts like Linda Anthony use AI to tailor roles to each person's profile, and can be copied without limit.

They'll tell you your résumé isn't up to par, but if you pay, they'll help you get an offer.

Other fake listings imitate real employers such as Hyundai Motor and Capital One.

Jay started down this path at the end of 2023, after he was laid off from advertising.

Right after he began job-hunting, he ran into a fake résumé writer much like Linda Anthony.

When they asked him to pay, he realized it was a scam and kept digging.

He says some fake recruiters also ask for a driver's license or Social Security number, then sell that data on.

Now, while he keeps looking for work, he trains cybersecurity professionals to spot scams and is seeking paid speaking engagements.

Grateful people online donate to him, and he sells apparel printed with slogans, one of which is: "I lay off scammers."

One of his scam-spotting tips: if someone's last name could also be a first name, take a second look.

After finding Linda Anthony, he also found "Olivia Parker" and "Jessica Bennett", both claiming to be recruiters at "Confidential".

A fake account's profile picture might be AI-generated, or a photo that's easy to grab, like one of a real-estate agent or an actor.

Once Jay posted about the Linda Anthonys publicly, the links quickly went dead.

He says: turn the lights on, and the roaches run.

Later he stumbled onto another scam, one that exploits people's trust in verified accounts.

Many users submitted ID to LinkedIn and got a "verified" badge, then forgot about their accounts.

Jay says that's a hacker's dream.

Scammers seize these verified accounts — whether the original owner was a teacher or an engineer — relist them as recruiters at real companies, and use that credibility to harvest job seekers' information.

One recently hijacked account originally belonged to a dentist in Chile.

This summer, he and a few others were suddenly listed as employees of a boutique recruiting firm in Colorado.

The firm's CEO, Kelley Barcus, was alarmed to see these new hires, because the firm is really just her.

She said: it's my brand, it's my reputation.

She asked Jay to help disconnect the accounts from her company page.

That wasn't easy.

LinkedIn accepted Jay's reports, but before removing the affiliation, the accounts had fourteen days to update their details or appeal.

LinkedIn says that in many cases, simply asking members to correct their own data resolves the problem.

Jay, though, was livid; he believed two weeks was plenty of time for scammers to con more people.

He said: scammers don't deserve fairness — it's economic terrorism.

LinkedIn's vice president of trust products said scammers adapt quickly to the platform's defenses, and fighting fraud is a battle with no end.

He added that verification offers extra context, but it isn't a guarantee.

Later this month, LinkedIn will roll out a feature letting verified employers instantly cut an unknown account's ties to their company.

Jay often has fifty tabs open on his computer at once, and his browser crashes several times a week.

He recently wrote online that he worries about the world his two young children will face, but one thing comforts him.

He said: when they grow up and hear what their dad did to make the world better, they'll know I meant it.

Do you think dealing with online recruitment scammers should mainly fall to the platforms, or do we also need ordinary people like Jay?