Tech job bait in India, personal referrals in Kenya: LinkedIn scammers prey on the unemployed

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology's impact outside the West.

LinkedIn job scams have become a borderless epidemic, preying on the hopes of desperate job seekers and costing victims across the globe anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $25,000.

While the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform connects millions of users to opportunities, it also serves as a shared hunting ground for fraudsters. From Nairobi and Lagos to Mumbai and Mexico City, a review of the fraudulent schemes reveals a crucial layer often missed: Scammers are masterfully tailoring their tactics to specific cultural expectations, industry trends, and economic pressures.

In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganised, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. In Mexico, bad actors capitalise on the informal nature of the job economy by advertising fake formal roles that carry a promise of security. In Nigeria, scamsters often manage to get LinkedIn users to share their login credentials with the lure of paid work, preying on their desperation amid an especially acute unemployment crisis.

In its transparency report for July-December 2024, LinkedIn said it had identified and removed 80.6 million fake accounts at the time of registration, up from 70.1 million in the prior six months. In the US, job scam texts were the second most common type of hoax reported in 2024, after fake package deliveries, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission.

“While online fraud continues to become more sophisticated, over 99% of the fake accounts we remove are detected proactively before anyone reports them,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Rest of World. “We're constantly investing in new technology and human expertise to strengthen our ability to detect and stop harmful behavior.”

LinkedIn has built features to help members identify trusted opportunities, including verification badges on job postings and recruiter profiles, which confirm details like company affiliation or verified identity, the spokesperson said. “We also offer filters for verified jobs and optional safety tools, including message warnings and scam detection, while also making it easy to report suspicious messages to us.”

Human resources experts believe the trend of people falling for such scams is likely to grow, given the desperation among workers amid the rise in layoffs globally.

Rest of World spoke to victims of such crimes, recruitment experts, and digital ethnographers to understand the trends in popular LinkedIn job scams.

India has become a hotbed for tech job scams, as financial and cultural pressures make IT graduates especially vulnerable to falling for opportunities that appear to be lucrative, Gayatri Sapru, a Mumbai-based digital anthropologist, told Rest of World.

“Cultural expectation is [that] if you study for IT, you should have no trouble getting a great job. But that's not often the reality, so the social pressure is intense,” Sapru said. “The history of Indian IT professionals getting lucrative foreign jobs means that many consider this a reasonable, logical offer.”

Earlier this year, Indian news website LiveMint reported a prevalent multistage scheme where scammers pose as mentors on LinkedIn, promising candidates help with getting jobs at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The scamsters pose in the companies' merchandise or inside their offices, offering free resume reviews and referrals. They then flatter candidates over a call, asking for five-star testimonials in exchange for their help. Once they collect enough positive reviews, they charge hundreds or thousands of dollars for more advanced mentoring or placement services.

Tech recruitment frauds are so prevalent in India that leading companies in the sector often warn job seekers against them.

India's leading homegrown IT companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, have “Recruitment Fraud Alert” sections on their websites, outlining tips to identify fraudsters.

“Amazon India has observed that certain agencies/individuals have been making job offers on behalf of Amazon in exchange for money,” says a post on the company's website. “Job aspirants have received dubious emails extending Amazon offer letters and asking for payments in lieu of Mediclaim, uniforms, laptops, etc. At Amazon, we don't charge a fee at any stage of our recruitment process.”

Last year, Michael Oruko, a journalist and communications professional, nearly fell for a LinkedIn job scam promising a position at New Kenya Cooperative Creameries, one of the oldest and largest dairy processors in East and Central Africa.

A recruiter reached out to Oruko's former boss, asking for a recommendation. Knowing he was unemployed at the time, his ex-boss encouraged Oruku to apply. Trusting the referral, Oruko began the interview process. The recruiter asked for statutory documents that Oruko didn't have, and suggested someone who could “fast-track” the paperwork for a small fee. Oruko refused, saying he'd rather wait for the formal process to run its course. The recruiter stopped responding soon after.

When Oruko posted about the experience on LinkedIn, a person reached out to him to share that he, too, had been conned the same way by the same person. In the latter case, the scammer had claimed he worked for a construction agency.

“Unfortunately, they had sent money for processing compliance documents only to be blacklisted and blocked,” Oruko told Rest of World. “I did a background search and realised the guy was using a fake title as a director of the organization on LinkedIn, but in [the] real sense, the organization didn't have an employee like that. I realised that I had not done enough due diligence despite my knowledge as a journalist. The desire to get a job had partially blinded me.”

Informality and corruption in Kenya's recruitment industry blur the lines between legitimate and fake opportunities, Tessie Waithara, a Nairobi-based digital researcher and anthropologist, told Rest of World. There is also low transparency in hiring processes, and even legitimate recruiters sometimes ask for a “facilitation fee,” which makes scammers' demands believable, she said.

“When you've been unemployed for months or even years, clicking ‘easy apply' on LinkedIn costs nothing, and it keeps the hope alive that maybe this will be the opportunity that works,” Waithara said. “So even when people suspect something might be off, that possibility of change outweighs the fear of being scammed. Scammers know this and design their schemes to mirror that system people are already used to navigating in Kenya.”

Even though Mexico has a low unemployment rate, the majority of its workforce is underemployed.

A record 54.9% of the total workforce in the country is engaged in informal jobs such as self-employed street vendors, domestic workers paid off the books, day laborers, and employees in unregistered businesses, according to the latest data from Inegi, a state-owned agency that generates statistical and geographic information.

This means well-paying formal jobs are scarce, and millions of workers operate without job security or social safety nets. Scammers capitalise on this to advertise fake formal jobs, according to Rosy Ortiz, a Mexico City-based headhunter and labor coach.

“There are ‘international companies' that look for people who have ‘Open to Work' on LinkedIn, regardless of their profile, and send an email offering an interesting position. But the person must pay for their trip abroad to attend an interview,” Ortiz told Rest of World. “They provide a bank account for the candidate to deposit an amount in dollars, and then they stop responding through any means. I have several coaches who have fallen for this type of scam while searching for executive-level positions.”

Last year, Luxoft Mexico, a tech company, alerted the public about scammers using its name to lure victims, as well as impersonating the company's employees to publish false job offers. It advised job seekers not to pay for the promise of employment at the company.

Busola, a 27-year-old resident of Lagos, graduated with a degree in philosophy in 2023. She soon started looking for an entry role in digital marketing, but couldn't find a job amid high unemployment in Nigeria. In June, she received an offer through a message on LinkedIn. The recruiter said Busola could earn money in cryptocurrency by promoting products and services on her LinkedIn account.

Desperate for work, she found the offer attractive.

“They told me to give them my login [credentials] so that they can show me how their job flow works,” Busola, who wished to be identified only by her first name, fearing social embarrassment, told Rest of World. “I hesitated for a while, but I was desperate, so I shared my details.”

Everything looked smooth until the next morning, when Busola lost access to her LinkedIn account. The scammers had hijacked her account and used it to distribute fake job referrals to her network in the following days. She never regained control of the account.

Data strategist Gbenga Ogunniyi narrowly escaped a similar scam because he had seen it happen to others.

The scammer who reached out to Ogunniyi initially negotiated a deal to post ads on his profile. They said his follower count would determine the payout, and with over 6,000 followers, Ogunniyi was excited about his prospects. But when the recruiter asked him to share his login credentials, he knew something was amiss.

“I knew instantly that this was a scam because I know a few people who had their accounts hacked,” Ogunniyi told Rest of World.

Such scams thrive in countries like Nigeria, where high unemployment and a weak economy have pushed many young professionals to take risks — at times while ignoring obvious red flags, Emmanuel Faith, founder of Lagos-based human resources consulting firm HR Clinic, told Rest of World.

“They want to believe it's real. That's what scammers count on,” Faith said. “More Nigerians are applying online or remotely, so the attack surface is larger.”

Faith said victims tend to believe LinkedIn offers because the platform is built on trust and professional credibility. “LinkedIn profiles contain valuable detailed data, real names, emails, job titles, education, work history, and sometimes even phone numbers, and this makes it easy to personalise attacks,” he said.

Damilare Dosunmu is a reporter for Rest of World covering Africa's tech scene. He is based in Lagos, Nigeria.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology's impact outside the West.

Source: Scroll
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