William Hogarth’s Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (1721). A satire of speculative frenzy, where social participation substitutes for verification, and legitimacy is conferred by crowd behavior rather than underlying substance. William Hogarth’s (1721). A satire of speculative frenzy, where social participation substitutes for verification, and legitimacy is conferred by crowd behavior rather than underlying substance. If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, you’ve probably noticed the growing prevalence of scams. As an entry-level jobseeker in cybersecurity, I’ve seen more than my share. If I wasn’t familiar with email headers from my CompTIA Security+ prep, I certainly am now after manually filtering through fake job emails. Many of those fraudulent emails trace back to listings I actually applied to on LinkedIn. Others almost certainly originate indirectly from the same ecosystem. That led me to a broader question: Is LinkedIn’s engagement economy itself becoming a security liability? Are its incentives incompatible with the security that its users seek? We see branding dominate substance in the feed every day. Just recently, I watched a senior employee at a Fortune 100 technology company and a prominent cybersecurity figure publicly promote and amplify the unverified claims of a career-changer who claimed to have “hacked” a major government agency. In reality, he had downloaded public data from a public API. The halo effect of borrowed credibility was enough to drown out basic technical scrutiny. That’s when the thought crystallized for me: Trust is an infrastructure property, not a branding claim. Trust is an infrastructure property, not a branding claim. If your infrastructure is set up for branding rather than trust, what does that say about the systems we’re all implicitly relying on? A story might help illustrate. I first connected with a hiring contact on LinkedIn after seeing posts about remote technical roles in a professional group. His profile presented him as a senior IT help desk specialist at a large defense contractor, and the posts had the familiar tone of someone operating a hiring pipeline. Quick poll-style posts, but par for the course on LinkedIn. I reached out, explained the kinds of remote Tier 1 or early analyst roles I was targeting, and shared my resume when he asked for it. At first, the interaction felt normal enough. He asked whether my resume was producing any results — which, in hindsight, is exactly the kind of question you would ask if your goal were resume harvesting rather than candidate placement. I said yes (mostly bluffing). He then offered generic feedback on my resume and pivoted toward suggesting a referral to a “certified resume writer.” I declined and said I preferred to revise it myself, given my background in writing and documentation. After that, his engagement noticeably dropped off. He stopped offering concrete feedback, and his responses became mismatched to my messages. I shrugged it off at first. Hiring wasn’t his job, after all. I couldn’t reasonably expect personalized attention. I later noticed that some of his posts had disappeared, as if the initial burst of engagement-seeking had been quietly rolled back. Later, he resumed posting about “we’re hiring” in groups. That disconnect stood out to me. It wasn’t overtly malicious, but it didn’t match the pattern I’d expect from someone genuinely trying to place qualified candidates. His new posts included an email address for candidates to send resumes to — and it did not belong to his employer. His posting also shifted from general IT groups to more demographic-specific groups. Not alarming on its own, but taken together, it felt less like targeted recruiting and more like broad interest-gathering. Less “filling roles,” more “collecting attention.” That’s when something felt off. What raised my guard was seeing candidates directed to send resumes to an external domain that did not match the employer being implicitly referenced. If this were a legitimate hiring pipeline, why route candidate data through an unrelated domain with no visible corporate branding? At that point, I stopped treating the interaction as routine job networking and started treating it as a lightweight trust-verification exercise. The first thing I checked was the domain being used for resume intake. A WHOIS lookup showed it had been registered only days earlier. New domains aren’t inherently suspicious, but in fraud and impersonation patterns, domain age is one of the fastest initial signals to check. Short-lived funnels disproportionately rely on newly registered domains. Next, I examined DNS and email configuration. Using tools like dig and public DNS lookups, I inspected the MX records and checked SPF and DMARC. Email was routed through a generic hosted provider, and there was no DMARC policy in place. Not illegal. Not definitive. But inconsistent with how established recruiting firms or corporate hiring pipelines typically configure their domains. dig When I tried to visit the domain in a browser, my VPN blocked the connection due to TLS issues. That pushed me to inspect transport security more closely. SSL Labs and curl showed a certificate hostname mismatch — the domain was presenting a certificate issued for a different hostname, consistent with misconfigured virtual hosting. This kind of setup error is common in low-effort deployments, but it undermines any claim of a stable, professional web presence. curl To understand what the domain actually served, I retrieved the raw HTML using: curl -k -L https://example-domain.net curl -k -L https://example-domain.net By bypassing certificate verification (without executing any client-side code), I could safely inspect the response. What came back wasn’t a company website at all, but a default parked-domain landing page from the hosting provider. No branding. No business information. No legal identity. The domain existed primarily to receive email, not to represent a real organization. I then checked for legitimate companies operating under the same name. One existed, but under a different domain. The resume intake domain appeared to be a lookalike. That created an additional brand-adjacency risk: someone could easily assume affiliation where none was established. None of these findings alone proves malicious intent. New domains exist. TLS misconfigurations happen. Small firms sometimes use hosted mail without full DMARC policies. But taken together, the pattern was consistent: the recruiting funnel’s technical infrastructure did not support the legitimacy being implied socially. The identity being projected and the infrastructure backing it did not line up. I also considered whether a large, compliance-heavy organization would plausibly endorse or even be aware of this kind of setup. In regulated environments, hiring pipelines are typically coupled to corporate domains, established web presences, and defined data-handling practices. Routing candidate data through a parked third-party domain with broken TLS identity doesn’t fit that pattern. By the end of it, what began as routine LinkedIn networking had turned into a small OSINT exercise. I went from “this might be a lead” to uncovering infrastructure that was newly registered, misconfigured, brand-adjacent, and effectively non-existent as a real corporate presence. At minimum, it was unserious and unprofessional. Whether it was intentionally deceptive or simply poorly constructed, I couldn’t definitively deduce the underlying game being played. Considering the risk posture, I landed on three plausible scenarios: The poster is a real person with a real job, carelessly promoting a sketchy third-party lead-generation funnel. The account is compromised or partially fabricated and is being used to lend credibility to resume harvesting. The profile is entirely fictitious (least likely, given its history and recommendations). The poster is a real person with a real job, carelessly promoting a sketchy third-party lead-generation funnel. The account is compromised or partially fabricated and is being used to lend credibility to resume harvesting. The profile is entirely fictitious (least likely, given its history and recommendations). If the poster is real, what does he stand to gain? If he is not affiliated with the domain, then he is lending credibility for negligible reputational gain. If he is affiliated, what margins in resume harvesting or third-party editing services justify the risk and effort? I couldn’t reconcile those loose ends. But I was confident that some form of sleight of hand was present. Fresh domain. Parked Zoho landing page. Certificate mismatch. Lookalike branding. No DMARC. Resume intake via hosted email. Broad demographic targeting. Minimal follow-through. No corporate web presence. Offshore registrant. The probability that this represented a legitimate but merely incompetent recruiting operation was significantly lower than the probability that it was some form of low-grade resume harvesting or lead-generation funnel. What this experience reinforced for me is a simple principle: Trust is an infrastructure property, not a branding claim. Trust is an infrastructure property, not a branding claim. If an organization is operating in good faith, that reality tends to be reflected consistently across domain ownership, TLS identity, email configuration, and web presence. When those layers don’t line up, it’s usually a signal to disengage. One of the more unsettling aspects of these funnels is how easily they accumulate incidental social proof. When reputable professionals at well-known companies engage with or amplify a post, it creates a perception of legitimacy—even when the underlying infrastructure does not support it. Platform credibility and infrastructure credibility are not the same thing, and the former is far easier to borrow than the latter. That asymmetry may help explain why scam exposure on a “professional” social network feels so persistent. The incentive structure rewards engagement and visibility, not verifiable trust. As long as credibility can be socially inherited without corresponding technical integrity, job seekers will continue to navigate a space where appearance reliably outpaces assurance. In such an environment, security threats do not merely persist—they thrive, virally migrating across layers of superficial social proof.
