The Vigilante Taking Down Job Scammers

0:05It's only letting me do either the Chrome tab, the window, or the entire screen. I'll start at the window I want to be on, and then, okay, I'll do it. All right. Hold on. It's almost midnight in Chicago, but Jay Jones is just getting started.

0:26So it is 11.17 p.m. Central Time on September 28, 2026. And this is the investigation. Jay is at his computer, face glowing off the blue light of the screen, voice hushed so he doesn't wake the family. So you look here and you can see like a bunch of profiles right here, and there's really nothing that looks untoward. But it isn't until you get to, let's see, this one looks suspicious, so let's take a look at it. Jay clicks on a LinkedIn profile. It's of a recruiter named Chris Wilson. The profile's been active for around three years. But the thing that stands out to Jay is that it only has a couple connections.

1:14Two connections, which makes no sense to have been on LinkedIn for three years and you're supposed to be an active recruiter. A quick reverse image search revealed that the same photo had been used on multiple other LinkedIn profiles.

1:30Jay goes down a rabbit hole and ends up on a website that's in Arabic. So like here, you see it's the same guy that was quote-unquote Chris Wilson. Let me turn this, translate this language. Um, hold on. Jay thinks the person in the Chris Wilson headshot is actually a politician from Egypt. An Egyptian parliamental candidate. I believe this photo was like from 2019.

2:02Jay pulls up other suspicious profiles. One uses a photo of an actress from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because I used to watch that show as a kid. And I'm like, wait a minute, that's not Eliza Dushku, is it? And it is. And another where you can see a watermark. If you click here, it's an iStock photo. You can faintly see the watermark from the stock place that they took this from. It says dissolve. What Jay is doing here is hunting for scammers. It's what he does night after night, searching for fake recruiter profiles and job listings. He flags them to LinkedIn, hoping the platform will take them down.

2:48Click, report, repeat. All with the goal of making the world a safer place for job seekers everywhere. Jay even has a superhero name for himself. The Profiler.

3:05LinkedIn says it stops tens of millions of fake members a year. Still, some scammers slip through the cracks. It's pure evil. Scammers don't get to do this and have no resistance. They don't get to ruin people's lives and think that that is okay. They don't get to just extract all of this wealth, resources, and knowledge from people and waste their time and ultimately get off scot-free. And, you know, that's something I couldn't stand by and tolerate. it. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Imani Moise. It's Thursday, October 1st.

3:48Coming up on the show, the man who's taking on job scammers, one profile at a time.

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4:38The profiler has a signature look. Think Inspector Gadget with a magnifying glass and a fedora. Do you normally wear a fedora when you are sussing out scammers? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's part of the detective motif, yes. So it signifies diligence. It signifies quality, integrity, rooting out and following every thread. Because what these scammers do is they'll multilayer their scams. And so for me, I follow every single thread. I go all the way down to where they're hiding at, turn the lights on, so they have to abandon that operation. And like every good superhero, the profiler has an origin story.

5:26Jay first got into scam busting back in 2023. He was working as a copywriter, and his wife was pregnant with their second child. And then he got laid off. I had a choice to make because two weeks after, you know, I was laid off, my daughter was born. So I'm dealing with all of those responsibilities that are ahead. Jay says he had what he calls layoff PTSD. Because when you get laid off, you have all of these feelings that come over you, this frustration, this stress. Jay started job hunting, and like a lot of job seekers, he went straight to LinkedIn. He switched on the Open to Work banner on his profile.

6:03And to his surprise, messages immediately started flooding in. Literally, when you turn it on, they come pretty immediately.

6:15So when I saw these messages immediately pop up to me, I was encouraged because I'm like, OK, maybe it's not as bad a job market as was told. Jay got multiple messages from profiles that claimed to be resume writers. Many of them complimented him on his work history and offered to help him spruce up his resume. And as I looked at it, I started to see a pattern in the messaging. I'm like, well, wait a minute, why are they talking essentially the same, but they're supposed to be entirely different recruiters, entirely different genders, you know, entirely different, you know, industries, but this language is boilerplate.

6:50Plus, to Jay, a lot of these profiles seem like clickbait. And so as I looked at it, I started to see the pictures were all of attractive women, pretty much. And I'm like, well, why are all these attractive women resume writers? But the biggest red flag? They were asking Jay for money up front. And, you know, I started to put it together that this was fraudulent. And then when I really found out what was going on, it angered me. And as I started to think about the scale of the problem, I was like, if they're trying to get me, they're trying to get millions of other people. And if I didn't do something, I felt like it would be a personal failure on my part to not stand up and, you know, fight against it.

7:30That's what actually spurred me to take action. And thus, the profiler was born. Jay has since reported over 60 ,000 fake jobs and scam profiles.

7:45There are lots of people out there right now who are vulnerable to the kinds of scams that Jay has been investigating. It is a pretty tough time to find especially a white-collar job. Our colleague Lindsay Ellis covers jobs, and she came across Jay over the summer. The scale of the problem is so vast and grand, and I see Jay as almost like a David versus Goliath, like, vigilante scam fighter. He has flagged so many fake postings and profiles that have eventually come off the Internet, which who knows how many people that could have ultimately helped. As of August, more than a quarter of unemployed people have been job hunting for over six months.

8:34Outside of the pandemic years, that's near the highest level in more than a decade. Almost two million people. And so you think about what that does, right? Like being on the job market, looking for work for more than half a year, there's a level of desperation that really takes hold among a lot of people looking for work who I interview about their searches. You know, they describe this crazy disconnect between the markets are doing great, the monthly jobs numbers, you know, doesn't show this massive spike in unemployment. And yet I keep hustling and can't get anyone to take my calls or even get an interview.

9:16Can you talk a little bit more about why this demographic of people who have been unemployed for a while are so vulnerable to these types of scams? Look, they could be short on money. I mean, severance runs out, savings dwindle. You know, there's a level of desperation of I'm going to jump at any opportunity that, you know, would be a scammer's dream. Job scamming has been a problem for years. One goal is to get unsuspecting job seekers to fork over their private information. That could be a driver's license or a social security number. Scammers could then sell that information online. Some scams even go so far as to extend fake job offers, where they charge applicants for work equipment and training that doesn't exist.

10:08At its worst, people get their identity stolen and their credit ruined. Or they hand over their savings right when they need it most. Do you know how much money has been lost to job scams like this? Are there any estimates? So the FTC has estimated that between 2020 and 2024, the amount that consumers reported losing to these scams jumped to$501 million from$90 million. that is a huge, huge increase. This summer, the FBI and LinkedIn even collaborated on a public service announcement for job seekers. That is a signal to me that, you know, the FBI is taking this seriously. LinkedIn is aware that this is a major problem, trying to get job seekers to really keep their antenna up as they navigate this pretty difficult and very scammy environment.

11:08Jay is still job-searching himself, and he's still fed up. What would you say is your mission statement or goal with a profiler? Getting real companies to have real candidates in their pipeline so they can hire them, and getting job seekers back to work as fast as possible without losing hope, losing their information, losing their money, and, you know, in some cases, their lives because people have taken their lives by being scammed. How you can protect yourself from job scams is next.

11:53The Profiler says there are a few things you can look out for to avoid being scammed.

12:07Scammers do that when they spin up these fake profiles because the naming convention doesn't look suspicious on its face. A lot of these scammy profiles use basically like the first name is a first name and then the last name is, you know, often a common first name. So Linda Anthony, Olivia Bennett, those types of patterns. And when you start looking for them online, you'll see them. When you see Linda Anthony here, Linda Anthony there, that's when you see that this is a data harvesting operation. Another thing to watch out for is hijacked profiles. Profiles that have a badge of verification but have actually been taken over by scammers.

12:52Verification doesn't necessarily mean a profile is safe. Jay says he once even found a verified profile of an infamous serial killer. There literally was a verified profile of Ted Bundy, the serial killer. And I found that over a year ago. But prior to me finding it, it had existed on LinkedIn for quite some time. So Oscar Rodriguez, the VP of Trust product for LinkedIn, told me flat out, look, you know, verification offers additional context, but isn't a guarantee. and that users need to be vigilant when they see even verified profiles, which to me is another signal about how large in scope these scams and problem profiles can be.

13:41A third warning sign? Any job posting that directs you to a third-party website that isn't run by the employer.

13:51What advice would you give job searchers right now? Go directly to the website. Don't publish your resume publicly online. Because, like I said, going back to the job scraping thing, if you post your resume publicly online, that's available for anybody to scrape as well. And so you're giving people the keys to your identity from that perspective. Jay says that he doesn't think the platforms are doing enough to stop the scammers. And that there's only so much American law enforcement can do because a lot of scams are international. When a U.S. citizen is scanned by somebody out of India, Pakistan, Nigeria, North Korea, and so on, typically there's no recourse.

14:31Like, if law enforcement can get the money back quickly, then that's a win. But, you know, unfortunately, in many heartbreaking instances, there's no recourse. So what are job listing sites like LinkedIn doing about this problem? LinkedIn told me a couple of things that I found really interesting. One, the company's VP of trust product told me that the scammers that someone like Jay would see or that you or I could come across, that is a tiny fraction of what could exist on the platform. In other words, the profiler is just seeing the tip of the iceberg. LinkedIn says its internal systems weed out the vast majority of scams before they ever appear on the site.

15:16The company said it stopped close to 90 million fake accounts in the second half of 2025 alone. But it's an endless game of whack-a-mole. LinkedIn told Lindsay that scammers are very adaptive. Which makes rooting this stuff out very difficult. And frankly, like, gives me more appreciation for what it takes for someone like Jay, you know, doing this as a one-man shop, to learn the ins and outs of how these scammers are operating. There are a lot of scammers out there, and you're only one man. Why do you think you're making a difference? I sat here before I started and I had this crisis of conscience.

15:58It's like, yes, I could do this, but how effective would it be? Like, would it really make a difference? And so I thought of that, and then I thought, well, how many times are, you know, companies and job seekers going to continue to be abused and, you know, follow what they're told to do and ultimately nothing changes or it gets worse. Like, when does it stop? When does somebody draw a line and say, hey, you know, we're humans. We're trying to actually provide for our families. We're trying to be productive. And this stuff is ruining people's lives. I think about the world that we're leaving our children.

16:35I think about what they will inherit. and I'm not confident and I'm not encouraged by what I'm seeing, but to do this work to help people be in a better space and help the next generation, that's what I think about. These days, Jay drives Uber to make ends meet. But he's also started a business where he trains cybersecurity professionals. For fans of the profiler, he sells merch, with catchphrases like, I lay off scammers. But most nights, he's still on the hunt. Okay, hold on. Let me try this again. Oh, got it. Okay. Our producer Sophie Codner shadowed Jay for about an hour. But it was starting to get late.

17:30I guess I'm going to head off and go to sleep. Are you going to keep searching? Yeah, I'll be up. It's 11.51 my time. I'll probably be up for another two, three hour. While we're sleeping, the profiler carries on, doing what he can to make the internet just a little bit safer. It's a massive problem. And however we can continue to keep pressure on this so it can actually be brought to a stop, that's what I'm about.

18:10That's all for today, Thursday, October 1st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.