“This trend started with North Korean hackers posing as recruiters working for Meta. And that’s often how it starts — that cybercriminals and other fraudsters go after successful and sophisticated state actors,” he says. 

“I myself have received an SMS via WhatsApp and a message via LinkedIn with a job offer. Both were quite obvious — there were warnings about the sender on WhatsApp and the sender on LinkedIn hadn’t really had time to build their profile and we had no common contacts,” Lipschütz says. 

But just because the people who tried to trick Lipschütz weren’t very skilled doesn’t mean other cybercriminals can’t be better at this job recruitment technique. With profiles that pretend to work at real companies or at pretend companies for which they have created a website, it can becomes more difficult to see through the scam — not least if they also make sure to build a network of contacts on LinkedIn.