My company Coalition Technologies has recently discovered a scammer is impersonating recruiters from our company using gmail addresses and fake but similar domains to ours. We have reported this to the local police and FBI for assistance. This scam is active and ongoing and new victims
The scam appears to be that the criminal uses fake Linkedin profiles (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-rodriguez-0ab0524/) they associate with our company (there is no way for us to remove these fake people as you can read here – https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/1589/removing-people-from-a-linkedin-page?lang=en). The scammer then uses misspelled versions of our domain registered at Google Domains such as http://coaitiontechnologies.com/, or http://coalitiontechnologie.com/ to do a fake interview with the candidate then send them a fake job offer. The interview is conducted from falsified gmail addresses such as interview.coalitiontech@gmail.com. The candidate is then sent a fake check for thousands of dollars and instructed to buy equipment using their debit / credit card from online vendors selected by the scammer. We believe the way the scam works is that this vendor is a front for stealing credit card information and possibly just the money processed. The scammer also will request a wire refund for an “overpayment”.
We have posted warnings about this scam on our Linkedin page https://www.linkedin.com/company/coalition-technologies and also on our job application page https://app.testedrecruits.com/jobsListings/1/coalition-technologies. However, the scammer never directs people to visit either of these pages so many victims are missing it.
We are asking the victims to provide us all the information they can about the criminal (email headers with IP addresses, gmails used, domains used, vendors used, etc). We are compiling this and providing it to law enforcement. The only way to report the fraud is by having the victim report it here https://support.google.com/mail/answer/8253?hl=en or here https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/61664/reporting-fake-profiles?lang=en. There is no way to get someone at Google or Linkedin to systematically help us fight this fraud.
Linkedin and Google both make money from getting more users signed up, even if they are fake. There is no way to get fake employees removed from your company profile on Linkedin, Google Domains does not provide any method for doing a DMCA takedown of a domain name, and neither company will provide the IP addresses of the criminals.
If the criminals are in a foreign country, we intend to hire an attorney in that country to interface with their legal system and put political pressure to bring charges against these scammers. Thank you for your help in getting these criminals caught so they can’t continue to do this to other people and other companies. If you have run into any similar scams, please contact us at careers@coalitiontechnologies.com.