Posted Resumes Can Be "Phished"

Posting your resume on some widely used job boards may be riskier than you think.

Tabatha Marshall recently posted a series of reports on her blog documenting how candidate information posted on CareerBuilder and Monster is mined by phishers – con artists who scan the Web for people who then become targets of often fraudulent bulk email campaigns.

The phishers pose as employers or recruiters. Electing to make your contact info private won't necessarily keep you off their radar, since phishers also send emails through the job board system to candidates who list job titles they want to be contacted about.

Some of these phony emails ask candidates to complete an application form on another site to qualify for a fictitious job offer or interview. The information the candidate provides is then sold to third parties, who can be identity thieves. Other phishing emails may be transparent scams that ask the candidate to supply their own bank account or PayPal information right off the bat. Marshall writes:

All of the emails offer positions with common job titles; many of them appear “canned” - that is, like form letters. But some of them appear to have been machine-translated or were written by individuals whose native language is clearly not English.

In a followup posting on June 21, Marshall reported that Monster's management is on top of the problem, but CareerBuilder seems to be ignoring it.

The lesson: Hearing from an employer who saw your resume on a mass-market job board may seem an effortless way to advance your job search. But before you pursue any contacts you receive via that route, you'd best put in some effort to check whether you're dealing with a legitimate potential employer or an Internet crook.

Of course, the blog you are now reading is owned by a company whose main business is operating industry-specific job boards. Our parent, Dice Inc., has a fraud prevention group that actively monitors both employer accounts and specific job postings.

CareerBuilder and Monster: taking identity theft and financial exploitation to new heights [Tabatha Marshall]
A friendly Monster’s got your back [Tabatha Marshall]