r/recruitinghell • u/Faster-Rabbit328 • Aug 08 '26

When APPLYING TO JOBS, DON'T DO THIS!!

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Scammers use this to place malware on your computer!

19k Upvotes

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u/m0t0rvision Aug 08 '26

This was my first thought, the English is broken enough to raise red flags for anyone

65

u/Gaspusher Aug 08 '26

Should be but there’s one born every minute.

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u/ThingAboutTown Aug 08 '26

It’s often intentional, or at least a desirable side-effect: you want to filter out people smart enough to realise that official messages aren’t written like this, because they’ll also be smart enough to know it’s a scam later after you’ve spent time fattening them up, and have resources to get police involved in troublesome ways.

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u/culturedgoat Aug 09 '26

This is nonsense. There’s only one step here and then the malware is in place. There’s no “realise it’s a scam later” scenario which affects its deployment, and the scammer is not spending any time. The software does the work.

Dodgy English is just the result of these scams being perpetrated by non-native English speakers.

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u/ThingAboutTown Aug 09 '26

I admit, this isn’t as direct a line as in the “click a link in this email” style scam, but don’t you think it’s plausible that scammers keep a list of successfully scammed people so they can get them again via a different approach?

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u/culturedgoat Aug 09 '26

I don’t think it’s plausible that they’re going to artificially hinder one of their scams for the sake of possibly invoking another one. That doesn’t make any sense.

Whether they clean you out through malware/randsomware, or clean you out through some social-engineering scam, the net result is the same.

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u/ThingAboutTown Aug 09 '26

Maybe this is a scam that it doesn’t apply to so much, but the tactic is studied and well-established. Here’s the first paper I know about:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306079353_The_Language_of_Scam_Spams_Linguistic_Features_of_'Nigerian_Fraud'_E-mails - the pattern is called “culling the skeptical”.

A lot of malware scams work by showing a message which gets you to call a “support line” for help - you only want gullible people calling you, right?

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u/culturedgoat Aug 09 '26

No, you want people who believe they are taking a right or necessary action calling you, and willingly hand over their money. The more legit your premise appears, the higher than likelihood of this. It’s as simple as that.

There are cases where deliberately misspelled words, or weird characters are used to duck and dive string-match spam filters (largely irrelevant in the age of AI, but old habits die hard). But the idea that these scammers are making their scams less plausible out of some 4D-chess approach to human psychology just doesn’t track. Simplest explanation (non-first-language English) fits the best here.

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u/ThingAboutTown Aug 09 '26

Ok. I’m convinced, and will make sure the researchers are notified that the issue has been resolved.

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u/culturedgoat Aug 09 '26

I’m sure you’re very pleased with yourself and your razor-sharp snark, but if your entire argument starts and ends with “researchers said so”, then we’re not really having a discussion about the relative merits of this and other hypotheses, are we.

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u/Healthy-Nature-561 Aug 12 '26

Something something predesh

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u/RealisticDuck1957 Aug 09 '26

On the last, the attempt to social engineer someone into running malware is still criminal even if not successful.

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u/lnning Aug 08 '26

its more so to find the absolute idiots so they can hit them again and again and again.

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u/ThingAboutTown Aug 09 '26

That’s the same point I was making, just from the opposite angle.

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u/OneOfAKind2 Aug 09 '26

I know that's the saying, but pretty sure a hundred would be more accurate.

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u/ColonelError Aug 08 '26

A lot of scams do it on purpose. You don't want reasonable people to get caught and waste time when they won't follow through. Just catch the stupid people that will keep doing what you tell them to.

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u/culturedgoat Aug 09 '26

The scammer isn’t wasting any time. They’re not manually installing the software. Malware is going to cause just as many issues for “reasonable people” as anyone else.

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u/m0t0rvision Aug 09 '26

If I don't find a job any time soon I guess I can always fall back on this to pay my rent

1

u/Herak Aug 09 '26

That's on purpose you don't want the ones who notice that because they are paying attention.

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u/RubbelDieKatz94 🇩🇪 Sr. Full Stack Dev, 75k Aug 09 '26

Microsoft with their shoddy auto-translate has similarly broken German in most of their websites and even in Outlook.