Job scams are real. So is the cost of assuming everything is one.
A message landed in a friend's LinkedIn inbox on a Thursday morning. It came from a recruiter, a director at a small London firm, and it pitched a commodities analyst role covering Latin American agricultural markets. The job meant analyzing sugar, coffee and grains, and tracking the politics and weather that swing their prices. It was, on paper, exactly the role she had been looking for.
Then…she almost deleted it.
Nothing about it was obviously wrong. It was a handful of small things. The subject line pushed for a reply. The opening sentence didn't parse ("a privately held trading house who cover mandates across strategy, operations, market entry and more"), and the description of the firm sounded like consulting boilerplate rather than anything to do with a trading desk. The job requirement arrived in a parenthesis, lifted out of a spec. The message closed by apologizing in advance in case she was the wrong person, with a smiley face.
Every one of those is on the list of things you're told to watch for. Together they were enough to make her assume it was a scam.
She sent it to us instead of deleting it. And she is happy she did!
What the check found
Stopping to check was the right call. But what she expected to find wasn't there.
Carmen ran the domain first. It came back clean across the threat feeds, with nothing flagged as malicious or suspicious anywhere, and the company had SPF, DKIM and DMARC all configured, which is the mail setup of an outfit that sends real email and cares whether it gets delivered. The domain had been registered about seven years earlier, eight months before the company formally changed its name. Those are indicators of a planned rebrand rather than a website stood up last month to prop up a story for a scam.
Then a security researcher pulled the company's record from the corporate register. The company was incorporated twelve years ago. It has filed accounts every year without a gap, most recently two months before the message. Its stated line of business is employment placement, which is to say, it is actually a recruiter. The man who signed the message was appointed a director on a statutory form filed in October 2020, naming him in full, with a birth month and service address that still match the register today. The phone number in his signature is the number published for him on the company website. He appears on the company's own team page under the same title he used to sign the message.
That's five independent sources going back five years all saying the same thing. Scammers don't usually set up an impersonation by planting a consistent statutory filing five and a half years in advance, unless they are spies haha.
One thing on the register wasn't spotless. A confirmation statement was showing overdue by ten days. It's an administrative filing about who owns and runs the company, small firms miss the deadline constantly, and next to twelve years of clean accounts it looks like nothing more than a missed deadline. If that were next to a dormant filing history, this would be a different article.
The message appeared rushed because contingency recruiters work at volume and write fast. That's about it, folks!
The failure nobody writes about
Every piece of advice about job scams is trying to help you prevent one kind of loss: you trust something you shouldn't, and it costs you money, or your identity, or six weeks of unpaid "training."
That advice is correct, and the scams it warns about are real and getting better. Fraudsters clone company websites, lift real employee names off LinkedIn, run entire interviews over chat apps, and send offer letters with the right logo in the right corner.
What the advice doesn't cover is what happens once you get good at being suspicious. You start flagging everything. An unfamiliar email domain, a company you can't immediately place, a message that arrived at a convenient moment, a typo. Any one of those is a fair reason to slow down. But they turn up in almost every message, and after enough weeks of that you stop replying to any of them. Then you lose out on opportunities.
Nobody usually writes the article about the job you didn't take because you assumed the recruiter was fake. It's not as sexy. But if you're mid-career and trying to move, the jobs that come to you cold could be the pivot you have been waiting for. Everyone competes for the internal promotion and the job-board posting. The role that reached you because your skills and history matched what someone was searching for puts you in a much stronger position.
My friend sat on that message for four days before she checked it. She has no way of knowing whether it would still have been open on day ten.
What suspicion actually tells you
When a message feels off, you have a gap in what you know about the sender. A gap is not evidence that the sender is fake. And most people have no way to close that gap. Googling the company gets you the company's own website, which is precisely the thing you weren't sure about. Asking a friend gets you their guess (unless they work here). So the doubt stays open.
Closing that gap usually just takes a few facts you don't currently have access to.
What Carmen and thirty seconds buy you
Submit the website and the phone number to Carmen and you get back the things that aren't visible from the message itself.
When the domain was registered, and whether it's flagged anywhere. A firm claiming eleven years in the industry from a website registered five weeks ago is a different conversation than one whose domain has been renewing since 2019. Registration age is one of the cleanest signals available and it's invisible unless you go looking.
Whether the phone number behaves like a scam number. Numbers used in fraud tend to share characteristics: set up recently, routed through internet calling rather than a phone carrier, no history attached, sitting in a number range that's been reported before. A number that has been published on the same company website for years looks nothing like that.
You get that back in plain language with the reasoning shown in under a minute. That's enough to answer the question actually in front of you: should I reply?
A clean result isn't a guarantee and we don't pretend it is. But it clears out the easy failures, which is most of them. If the domain went up last month and the number is a fresh internet line with no history, you have your answer and it costs you nothing. If everything holds, you have removed the reason you were about to ignore the message AND A COOL JOB!
When you want a person on it
Sometimes the fast check comes back clean and the situation still deserves more, usually because the stakes went up. You're being asked to relocate. There's money moving before you've started. The company is small enough that public data is genuinely thin. Or, as in my friend's case, you'd just rather know before you spend a month of evenings on a process.
That's the point to escalate to a security researcher. A researcher can go to the corporate register, pull the filing history, and read the actual appointment document to establish whether the business is really operating. They can also work out whether the person who contacted you is genuinely part of it, by checking how old the profile is, whether the employment history reads like a real person doing a real job, and whether the company's own website backs up the title in the signature. Impersonating a real employee at a real company is common precisely because the surface checks pass.
You get back what was found. In this case the researcher confirmed that the sender was a real person at a real company, holding the job he said he held.
Confirming the sender is the first step and not the whole job. A real recruiter can still front a process that goes wrong later, and a convincing impersonator can turn up months into a friendly thread. So the researcher proposed a few recommendations that hold no matter what a check comes back with:
- Call the number listed on the company's own website instead of replying in the thread.
- Never pay for anything, and never move money on someone else's behalf.
- Hold on to your identity documents and bank details until you have a written offer and you've spoken to someone in HR.
Why check with us?
Getting scammed is costly. Screening yourself out of your own career is too. The fix is to make checking cheap and easy enough that it stops being a reason to do nothing. Half a minute and a straight answer, and then you can go and reply to the message.
Go Get That Job Gurl.
Backgrounder. Just be sure.
This case is based on a real check. Names, company, sector, dates, phone number, and all identifying details have been changed to protect the people and businesses involved.