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One of your people gets a message from a recruiter on LinkedIn. The profile looks credible, the role sounds plausible, and the tone is professional. It reads like networking, not an attack.
That is exactly why these scams work. A fake recruiter message is one of the cleanest social engineering tricks going around, because it does not look like a trick. It arrives as a normal conversation that nudges someone toward one small action: click this link, open this file, verify this detail, or move the chat to another app.
What this actually looks like
These scams borrow credibility from recognisable brands, polished profiles and familiar hiring language. They blend into ordinary professional behaviour, which is what makes them hard to spot.
The pattern is usually predictable once you know it:
First, a polished approach lands on LinkedIn. The profile and role look believable, though the job post itself may be oddly generic and lean on broad language to catch as many people as possible.
Second, there is a quick push off-platform. The conversation shifts to email, WhatsApp, Telegram or a "recruitment portal" link. That move matters, because it removes LinkedIn's built-in friction and makes it easier to send links, files and instructions.
Third comes a credibility wrapper: an "assessment", an "interview pack" or "onboarding steps". The story is something like "download this assessment" or "log in here to schedule".
Then the pivot. Scammers impersonate well-known companies and ask for things real employers rarely request: payment for "equipment", upfront fees, or personal information early in the process. A subtler version uses "verification" steps designed to steal identity details or take over an account.
Throughout, there is pressure to keep moving. Limited slots, fast-track hiring, complete this today. The scam depends on momentum, so it never lets the target slow down and check.
Why it matters for your business
The scale is hard to picture. LinkedIn said it identified and removed more than 80 million fake accounts at registration in the second half of 2024, and claims it detects over 99 percent of those proactively before anyone reports them.
Even with detection that good, enough activity still leaks through to reach real employees. That is especially true when scammers tailor their pitch to what looks credible in a particular industry or region, which is easy to do for an Australian business with public staff profiles.
These scams do not succeed because your people are careless. They succeed because the outreach looks normal, the process feels familiar, and the next step is always framed as urgent. The Australian Cyber Security Centre and consumer regulators describe the same persuasion pattern again and again: urgency, authority, and a quick push to the next action.
Once someone is rushed into treating the process as real, the scam does not need to be technically sophisticated. It just needs the target to keep going.
What actually works
The fix is not turning everyone into an investigator. It is setting a few simple defaults that make scams harder to complete.
First, slow down before clicking. Treat unexpected links, attachments and "portals" from recruiters as something to pause on, not act on.
Second, verify the recruiter and the role through official channels. Look the company up independently, check the careers page, and confirm the person exists through the real organisation rather than the contact details they handed you.
Third, keep conversations on-platform until identity checks out. A genuine recruiter will not mind. A scammer wants you off LinkedIn quickly.
Fourth, set hard stops that never get bent. Any request for money or fees, any request for sensitive personal information before a real interview, and any request for a verification code sent to a phone or email. All of those are an immediate stop, every time.
Fifth, give people an easy way to report suspicious outreach. If reporting is quick and free of blame, you find out about attempts early instead of after something has gone wrong.
A handful of red flags make most of these obvious: a vague or overly broad role, a company web presence that does not match the brand name, a recruiter using a free webmail account instead of a company domain, and anyone dodging basic verification questions.
When those habits are standardised across the team, the scam loses its grip and your normal networking carries on as usual.
The goal is not suspicion of everyone. It is a small set of shared rules so the people who hire and network do not have to make a security call under pressure.
Where we fit
This is the work we do under AgileSECURE: identity and email protection, security awareness training that gives staff practical defaults like the ones above, and controls aligned to the ASD Essential Eight and SMB1001. We help you turn good intentions into habits the whole team actually follows.
If you are not sure how your business would hold up against this kind of approach, that is a conversation worth having. We will look at where your people and accounts are exposed and what simple changes would make the biggest difference.