The Best Job You Never Had

By Jay Jones, The Profiler

You’re excited about upcoming graduation. You’re spending the last weeks talking about how you’ll celebrate with friends and family. To top things off you have a perfect job lined up at a Fortune 500 company. Offer letter signed, background check complete, check for home equipment setup deposited, start date confirmed. On your first day you can’t log in or reach anyone you spoke to before. You think it’s a technical issue but as the hours pass by a great feeling of dread sweeps over you. 3-5 days later that check you deposited bounced. Now, your account is $3,000 or more in the negative. Welcome to the best job you never had. 

While this story sounds made up it happens every day to college students who don’t know the dangers within this job market. Scammers run this con against college students every day. They target you when you’re most vulnerable: broke, optimistic, and eager for that first real paycheck. 

The Perfect Storm for College Grads

I was scammed in college out of over $6,000. However, it wasn’t by a foreign con artist. My own brother did it. I know the pain, confusion, sadness, depression, rage and violation you feel because I went through it. As a college student, you’re the ideal mark for scammers.  Here’s how they built a multi-billion-dollar industry around you.

First, you’re time-poor and cash-strapped. Tuition debt typically averages $37,000+ per borrower. Rent in college towns usually eats 50% of part-time income. That “quick” $25 application fee or $200 “equipment advance” feels like a reasonable hurdle when you’re staring at an empty fridge.

Second, you lack pattern recognition. You’ve never hired anyone. You’ve never seen a real recruiter workflow. When a LinkedIn profile with 500+ connections and the company logo DMs you about an “urgent remote role,” it looks legit. You don’t know recruiters never ask to rewrite your resume. They get paid to recruit. While real recruiters will make suggestions on where to strengthen your resume because they have a vested interest in placing you, they don’t charge you for that. 

Third, platforms say they are safe and trustworthy, but the truth tells otherwise. LinkedIn is rife with scamming. There are millions of spam incidents blocked yearly, but fakes still slip through because systemic change would reduce revenue. Job boards get scraped and cloned. A scraped or cloned job is one where a third-party company claims to be in a business relationship with the original job poster to help them fill the role. 

The truth is they used online scrapers to take publicly listed jobs; pretend they’re hiring for them with the end goal being to farm your personal information and sell it to data brokers. Career services offices are overwhelmed with 1,000+ students per advisor. Most don’t know that 27.4% of LinkedIn job postings are fake or ghost jobs.

Fourth, your network is small. Mom and Dad typically aren’t on LinkedIn. Professors don’t check company pages. That “offer” from “Sarah Johnson, Talent Acquisition at [BigCorp]” has zero mutual connections, but you’re too excited to notice. The result? You hand over your SSN, bank details, and are robbed before breakfast. Scammers laugh. Your credit score plummets. Real employers later see the fraud flags in your background check and pass.

How I Started Hunting Scammers

It was December 4, 2023. I was asked by my then manager to hop onto what I thought was one of our routine Teams meetings. When the video came up there was a surprise guest—HR. In that moment I knew my time at the company was over. Laid off from my ad agency dream job as a senior copywriter. I didn’t have time to grieve, didn’t have time to process. The clock was ticking. My daughter was born by planned cesarean two weeks later… 

I put up #OpenToWork banner on LinkedIn because it’s championed as the thing to do when looking for work. In minutes I received a wave of interest which excited me. I quickly realized the “recruiters”, “resume writers”, “hiring managers” and other talent acquisition professionals weren’t real. I first reported and blocked them. 

This is a recent example of a hijacked profile:

The picture was changed and the headline and profile contents were changed using another real person’s information.

This is the real profile:

After a continual onslaught over the next several days, I knew reporting and blocking wasn’t enough. While they couldn’t get me, I knew they would scam millions of other people. I had the means via investigative abilities to follow every thread and stop them from taking advantage of people. 

My first case was about a fake resume writing company called TenStarResume Limited. Now they’re gone from LinkedIn, and the company is formally dissolved in disgrace. Fake recruiter profiles. Two years later: 51,172 fake jobs removed, 7,000+ scam profiles terminated, 1,000+ hijacked accounts derailed or reclaimed, 100s of fake companies exposed. Featured in NBC News.

I learned the patterns college students miss:

• Fake profiles join LinkedIn same month, same city.
• Jobs use real company language but wrong salary/culture.
• Recruiters push WhatsApp over email.
• Fees always come after “you got it!”

How my work as The Profiler Protects the Education Industry

My work isn’t just takedowns. It’s prevention at scale. Here’s how I shield college grads and the brands they trust.

For Students:

• Scam detection guides shared with career centers nationwide.
• Profile audits: I check your target employers’ pages for fakes.
• Red flags checklist: 12 signs of scam jobs you can verify in 60 seconds.
• Recovery playbooks: What to do if you already sent money to a scammer.

For Universities & Career Services:

• Company page audits: Find spoofed pages stealing your logo.
• Job posting forensics: Which roles are being scraped and weaponized.
• Student training modules: Plug-and-play workshops for 100+ students.
• Platform escalation: Evidence packs that force LinkedIn/Indeed action.

For Employers:

• Scraper blocking: Job formats scammers can’t clone cleanly.
• Fake applicant filtering: Patterns that flag bot-generated resumes.
• Brand defense: Ongoing protection.

Real Wins:

— 51,172 fake jobs removed.

— South Australian Business Chamber: 197 fake jobs exposed, no platform warning.

—  20+ companies and organizations: Career pages cleaned, students warned before interviews.

Here’s the multiplier effect. When I clean a company’s page, 500 students stop seeing fakes. When career centers train with my playbook, 5,000 grads spot red flags. When platforms remove 51K jobs, millions breathe easier.

Students’ first job shouldn’t cost them $5,000 and a ruined credit score. It should launch their career. Scammers built this machine on broken trust. I’m dismantling it by taking down tens of thousands of fake jobs, thousands of fake profiles and hundreds of fake companies.

If your college, department, or career center wants to protect students from fake jobs and recruiter scams, I can help. As The Profiler, I work with universities to investigate real scams targeting their students and deliver practical training, checklists, and resources that make job searching safer without scaring students out of applying. I offer in-person or virtual speaking and consulting services through career service offices.

Stay vigilant.

• Business inquiries: inquiries@theprofiler.org 
• The Profiler Website: https://theprofiler.org
• Copywriting Portfolio: https://jonesdoyoucopy.com 
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jonesdoyoucopy