Recruiter impersonation scam
I'm Stacy Zapar, a recruiter, trainer, consultant and speaker. Founder of Tenfold and Fraud Squad.
For the past year or so, several Fake Stacy accounts have been sending recruiting outreach messages using my name and LinkedIn profile to scam jobseekers.
Yes, they misspelled my own last name as Zaper instead of Zapar. Multiple reports to Google have done nothing to shut them down.
None of these emails are from me. If you got one, you were targeted.
Fake Stacy stole my real name, my real logo, my real website, and even my real home address for their email signatures.
After receiving scam outreach from Fake Stacy, skeptical jobseekers started messaging me on LinkedIn to ask if the opportunity was legitimate.
I put a fraud alert at the top of my LinkedIn About section. It helped, but I was still getting contacted multiple times weekly.
One jobseeker target wrote a whole LinkedIn post with screenshots warning others that Stacy Donovan Zapar is a scammer.
To my horror, many commenters had also interacted with Fake Stacy.
Now my name and reputation are being impacted on top of the damage to jobseekers.
Many victims received outreach within minutes of turning on the Open to Work banner on LinkedIn.
That tells me the scammers likely have LinkedIn Recruiter access, giving them real-time visibility into jobseekers who are actively looking.
They are targeting people at their most vulnerable moment.
LinkedIn uses Recruiter licenses to verify authenticity. Think about that.
Any scammer who purchases a Recruiter seat is not only buying access to jobseekers, they're also buying a verification badge.
The same feature meant to signal trust is being used to manufacture it. This is a gap that needs closing.
Fake Stacy contacts a jobseeker about a VP-level role. The email uses my real name and links to my real LinkedIn profile.
The job title and/or company are often completely made up. The target has no reason to question it.
Instead of putting a first and last name in Gmail's name field, scammers may put the real corporate email address to deceive you.
At first glance, it looks like a corporate email but it's really a Gmail in disguise.
Fake Stacy asks for a resume to submit to the hiring team. This is data collection.
They have not asked for money yet; they're building trust first.
No company name. No hiring manager name. Just enough detail to feel real and enough flattery to keep you engaged.
To “advance to the interview stage,” Fake Stacy says the hiring panel requires three documents:
You have never heard of these and that's intentional. They sound official, but are not.
The payment link goes to a random third-party account. Not a recruiting firm. Not a staffing agency.
Fake Stacy even wrote the amount as $4O0, with a letter O substituted for a zero. Scammers do this to slip past automated fraud detection filters.
The job does not exist. The company does not exist. The documents never arrive.
You are out $400 and your personal info is in their hands, possibly used by fake candidates to apply for jobs as you or a catfish version of you.
If you ask for verification, Fake Stacy hands you my real LinkedIn URL and even encourages you to send an invite to connect.
That is the trap.
Real recruiters never ask candidates for money. Ever.
The recruiter names are often real, but the emails and job opportunities are not.
Think you were contacted by a fake recruiter? Search our list of known impersonators to verify and spot patterns.
If you are a recruiter being impersonated, submit your details and we will add your imposters to the list.
Join the Fraud Squad, a practitioner community for recruiting professionals mobilizing to fight back against candidate fraud.
Tenfold helps TA teams build the skills and processes to change that.