techenthu123's journey

A month ago, I encountered a recruiting scam that I want to share as a cautionary tale. I was contacted on LinkedIn by someone claiming to represent a sizable U.S.-based investment firm for a role that seemed perfect for my background. After doing my research, I checked the recruiter's LinkedIn profile, which appeared genuine, and the firm, while not a household name, seemed credible enough. I asked several clarifying questions about the position, and the recruiter informed me that I would need to go through an AI interview process via a platform called Canditech. The first red flag was that the email I received didn’t come from the firm's official domain. I directly asked the recruiter about the legitimacy of the email and was reassured. However, I still had a nagging feeling that something was off. It took me five working days to finally agree to try the AI interview, as I had mixed experiences with AI interviews in the past—my success rate in human-led interviews is significantly better. When I opened the link and started the process, I encountered an alarming error message about an "Encoding/transcoding pipeline failure" with strange instructions to open Terminal on my Mac and run an FFmpeg command. This raised my concerns further, so I decided to message the hiring manager on LinkedIn before proceeding. To my shock, the LinkedIn profile that had contacted me had completely changed—different name, different details, and clearly a fake identity. I reported the profile immediately. What struck me about this experience was not just the scam attempt itself, but how sophisticated and patient these scammers are becoming. The job search process is already exhausting, and it's disheartening to see bad actors exploiting the vulnerabilities of job seekers.