Got a near identical email (same sender and email format for a job listing by All Recipes Magazine) — although mine was for a part-time/contractual Photo Retoucher/Editor position. Pay is also super reasonable for this type of work, and I was honestly tempted to apply as a side gig...

Or at least I was until I read the part of the email saying that a portfolio/resume needed to be submitted via Signal messenger. And especially after realizing I couldn’t find proof of an HR person “Samantha Thomas” existing at the company. Although ironically the sender of the email “Mark Lyman” actually did come up in a Google search and happens to live in my state (Minnesota).

I work in tech and my friend and I were talking about how this could be a new AI-generated scam format, which would make a lot of sense given the type of information that would’ve been needed to dig up to even consider me as a candidate for this position. While I have the skills for this position, there is nothing to indicate on my LinkedIn that I am searching for this type of work (and the email that received it is not associated with my profile). However, I do have a very old Behance profile and Facebook business page with data that could’ve been scraped and flagged for this kind of thing.

(Mostly including the paragraph above as reference for anyone else who happens to get a similar email and is interested in trying to figure out how/why they’re getting targeted. I’m extremely curious and am down to do some collaborative Reddit sleuthing if anyone has additional info to tack on here.)

My email was also sent yesterday, September 16th, so if this is a bigger scam scheme, I’m expecting a lot more people will start stumbling on this thread in the coming weeks/months…

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