One Out-of-Work Copywriter Has Killed 60,000 Fake Job Ads

Jay Jones has helped remove nearly 60,000 fake job postings, most of them on LinkedIn, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. He is not a platform employee, a regulator or a security contractor. He is a 39-year-old out-of-work copywriter from Chicago who drives for Uber in his spare time.

Jones calls himself "The Profiler." Recruitment scammers, he says, call him a problem.

The job-seeker spends hours every day tracking fraudulent listings and fake recruiters on job boards — the same platforms he relies on for his own hunt for work. In late-night sessions, he told the Journal, he has identified roughly 7,000 fraudulent recruiter profiles, many of them built to steer unsuspecting applicants toward fake openings that impersonate legitimate employers.

"It's like rabbit hole after rabbit hole," Jones told the Journal.

How the scams work

The fake accounts serve as a human facade for the listings. They use stolen identities and copied photos to draw applicants into sharing sensitive information.

Jones recently encountered a recruiter on LinkedIn named Linda Anthony. A quick search turned up a handful of profiles with the same name. At first glance, the accounts looked polished — friendly headshots, recruiter-style bios. Then Jones spotted the pattern: the same profile picture, accounts created around the same time, and nearly identical strings of letters and numbers at the end of their LinkedIn URLs.

To him, those repeating digital fingerprints showed the profiles had been spun up in batches, not built by real recruiters. Once deployed, the accounts could blast messages to job-seekers at scale, using fake opportunities to harvest personal details or persuade targets to hand over money.

A growing pool of victims

The scams land on fertile ground. In August, 1.9 million Americans had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks — about six months — representing 27% of all unemployed workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That share sat near its highest level in more than a decade. Prolonged job hunts make an already stressful process harder and leave job-seekers more exposed to fraud.

LinkedIn's machine answers

LinkedIn says it increasingly relies on automated, AI-driven defenses to intercept fraudulent activity before it reaches users. The company told the Journal its systems proactively block 99.5% of the fake accounts it detects and remove 98.7% of identified scam and spam content before members see it. In the second half of 2025, LinkedIn said, it stopped nearly 90 million fake accounts before they became active.

The platform also recently introduced a "seems like AI slop" button that lets users flag AI-generated content.

The arms race

Jones argues the scammers are adapting just as fast as the defenses. Automated recruiter personas such as "Linda Anthony," he says, can use AI to make outreach sound tailored to an applicant's work history. Exposing these profiles publicly is, in his view, one of the few effective countermeasures.

"You turn the lights on and the roaches run," he said.

For LinkedIn, the math is sobering: a platform that blocks tens of millions of fake accounts still leaves enough room for one unpaid vigilante to find 60,000 fraudulent listings — a gap that suggests the automated defenses, however impressive at scale, are not closing the recruitment-fraud problem on their own.