A different kind of scam

Recently there has been a rise in phishing scams and other types of scams surrounding recruitment. This is performed via email, so not entirely following the attack vector of this blog (SMS) - but it follows the same theme and I wanted to call this out as I was recently targeted by one.  The premise of this scam is that you receive an email from someone fraudulently posing as a "senior recruiter for senior level positions" at top companies like "Google, IBM, etc...". They claim that they came across my profile via LinkedIn and they would like me to forward my resume to them as they say "we have a good fit for you at the client we are working with".

Of course, I was intrigued. Why would I not? I receive communications from recruiters once in a while so this is not entirely unexpected. I did some digging, however, I couldn't find this person anywhere online and I could not find the company they claim they work for. Plus there was a slight misspelling in the email. This did raise some red flags but I went ahead and sent them my resume regardless.
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After a few weeks, the recruiter emails me back saying that they have "received my resume" (weeks later which is immediately suspicious for a "Senior Executive Recruiter") and that they cc'd someone else who is leading the recruitment project. This person would reach out and schedule an interview call.

After this, I came across multiple accounts of recruitment scams that have been reported by the FBI & FTC. Essentially at some point in the process, the recruitment firm attempts to extract some sort of monetary value out of our email correspondence. Usually this is  surrounding a follow up email by the recruitment firm claiming that they would love to schedule a call but they are having trouble uploading my resume to their candidate management system. They then go on to ask for me to send another email with a resume. I also referenced this blog, which solidified my belief that this was a scam attempt: https://www.techlicious.com/tip/how-to-avoid-fake-job-scams/comments-/CP4/

Long story short, I just received this email (below) from the recruiter that matches this story flow. What happens next is that if I send my resume to this person again, they will email me back in a few weeks to claim it still doesn't work and they will redirect me to some website that will charge me some arbitrary amount of money.

As a note, if you are unable to locate any individuals you are virtually corresponding with via LinkedIn, nor their company, and they claim to be Senior Executive Recruiters that take weeks to respond and then seemingly can't open a PDF (which in my experience is in direct contradiction to that level of role/experience you would expect) - please stop your correspondence immediately.

Lastly, it has come to my attention while looking into this that this is also a type of scam related to collecting personal identifiable information (PII) on a person. To what extent and why is a large question that we can't necessarily understand as there is no reason for the scammer to divulge that information. However, what we can do is make sure that any information you divulge on a resume is appropriate and if the information is divulged that it is either already publicly available or you are okay with being publicly available.

If you receive an email from anyone claiming to work for "The Lead Corp", or have the email of "[email protected]" or "[email protected]" please be cautious.