It’s probably the growth of AI, or something, but I’ve noticed a real uptick in the number of fake recruitment emails I have received recently.

Three in the last ten days came purportedly from staffers at a firm called Aptra Elvaris Global. It actually has a website, and all three of the recruiters are featured on the Team page. Twelve people are listed there, each with headshots and links to their LinkedIn profiles.

There are several red flags here. First of all, all three messages came from Gmail addresses rather than Aptra Elvaris corporate addresses. That’s enough to bin them immediately. No serious corporate recruiter is going to write to you from their private address.

Second, not a single one of the supposed team’s LinkedIn pages refers to them working for Aptra Elvaris – one of the team doesn’t have a LinkedIn page at all, for reasons we will get to – nor does the company itself seem to have any LinkedIn presence. Again, if you’re a serious online business these days, you need to demonstrate it by having a serious online presence.

Third, I ran a standard check on the Aptra Elvaris website, and it turns out that it was set up only on 2 September this year. That’s awfully recent for a company that claims to have been in operation for some time and that boasts such impressive credentials. If it was a case of rebranding of an existing firm, you’d expect a statement to that effect somewhere.

I won’t give the names of the first two supposed staffers in whose names emails were sent to me. (I did write to both the real people to let them know, not that they can do much about it, and one sent a brief polite reply.) The third, however, is a different matter.

There was indeed a Mike Rasnak who held the job of Senior Executive Recruiter at a Florida-based head-hunting company called Executive Leadership Solutions (whose website now appears to be defunct). However the real Mike Rasnak died in 2020, so it is very impressive that he is still sending recruitment emails six years later, though less surprising that his LinkedIn profile is no longer available.

It’s obviously a scam of some kind. I’ve posted this on my other channels, and the most widely held view is that they hope to build up a dialogue at the end of which they will demand some large sum of money to improve my CV, though one can imagine other scams. JA gave me a list of possibilities:

1) They’re organising the visa for you. To prove your commitment, you just need to pay it yourself and they will reimburse you later.

2) Housing. Similar to 1. They’re renting luxury accommodation for you. But they did this in the past for people who let them down, so if you can just send 1 month by Western U[nion], they’ll refund you when you arrive.

3) The sneakiest. To ensure you’re coming, you need to book the flight through their affiliated travel agent. You contact the agency and they quote you an inflated price for the flight. You have a promise of reimbursement and pay. Fun part is, the flight is real, but when you get there, there’s no job. If you complain to the travel agent they deny all knowledge of the sister company. You contacted them about a flight, they quoted you a price, you agreed and paid, they provided you what they promised. Of course, behind the scenes, they split the profit with the scammers.

What surprises me is the curious combination of detail and sloppiness. Setting up an entire, fairly elaborate website to support your story is a significant investment of time and presumably some money; but then why spoil it by not using the related email addresses? And linking to the LinkedIn profiles of totally unconnected people is a high risk strategy, and possibly even illegal, as well as being a very easy mistake to catch.

I wonder if anyone at all will be taken in. But of course they have probably sent tens or even hundreds of thousands of emails like the three that I received, so they may just manage to get through to someone who is feeling vulnerable and whose defences are low.

The depressing thing is that the scammers are going to get better at this, as social engineering techniques improve, and we will all have to continue being vigilant. Ten seconds’ research can save an awful lot of hassle.