10 yellow/red flags in the story that young people can use to avoid this: 1. Multiple small grammar issues like spaces and capitaliation: the screenshot at the

10 yellow/red flags in the story that young people can use to avoid this: 1. Multiple small grammar issues like spaces and capitaliation: the screenshot at the bottom shows the original Linkedin ping. It shows multiple small grammar issues like too many exclamation points, missing spaces between sentences, a randomly capitalized word like "New", and unnatural phrasing, like "Therefore..." which is more at home a mathematical proof than a recruitment email. A lot of scammers are not native english speakers and/or often the message is translated to english from another language using something like Google Translate. But the HR person of a US/western company will always ping you with a templated message which was probably written by a native speaker and/or proof-read (since it's a template re-used 1000s of times). It still may have a typo, but not multiple obvious ones like random capitalization. 2. Email address: when a recruiter emails you, it'll be from their real work email, like john.smith@example.com. This is because HR people know that more personalized pings have higher open and response rates. Companies never send outgoing recruitment emails from an address like info@example.com. 3. Job title: the job title here is "Remote Product Design Manager". In real life it's more likely to be "Product Design Manager" with remote being not capitalized and mentioned elsewhere. Here the "Remote" is part of the bait. 4. Domain name: doesn't match. Domain names are part of a company's identity, so recruiters will definitely use one of the "main" domain names of the company. 5. Recruitment loops usually takes several weeks, rarely less than a month. So being asked to be online at a specific time for updates is unheard of (to me), because recruiters know that they may take anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks to get any sort of feedback. 6. Too good to be true: no serious company will offer you a job based on 1 interview. 7. CIO: why would the CIO of a large 7000+ person company like Splunk talk to a fresh-out-of-school new hire? 8. Apple Watch Series 7: why would a company buy you a watch? (Unless you're working on the watch product.) 9. Send hardware to the company: this rarely happens like this. Companies procure the hardware themselves (they get volume pricing, and usually have their own stock), install corporate software like VPN software, and then give/send it to new employees. This is true for laptops, phones, etc. 10. Linking cards: I don't understand what happened, but companies never ask you to link your personal stuff (whether it's a bank card or your personal gmail) to company stuff. Your personal stuff is like poison to them, they want to keep it away from corporate stuff.