The Recruiter Who Was a Data Funnel

I received a LinkedIn message yesterday. Clean profile. University of Pennsylvania credential. UK location. Verified badge. The person said they were recruiting for a Tier-1-backed San Francisco team hiring reinforcement learning engineers. Pay range: $50–165 an hour. They opened with “friend-of-a-friend” without naming the friend, then asked if they could send me a vacancy link.

I clicked through to the profile. Not because I was interested in the job. Because the construction felt engineered.

The “About” section talked about transforming recruiting and helping companies avoid revenue loss from slow hiring. Big process claims. No placement evidence. No companies named. No teams referenced. I looked for one testimonial with a placed candidate’s name attached. There wasn’t one.

Then I checked the endorsements. Every person endorsing this recruiter worked in outbound sales, demand generation, or staff augmentation. Not a single hiring manager. Not one person saying “this recruiter placed me at Company X.” Just a tight circle of people whose job is moving attention through funnels.

That’s when it snapped into focus. This wasn’t a recruiting operation. It was a lead-generation system wearing recruiter language.

How Data Harvesting Scams Evolved in the AI Hype Era

The old job scam was obvious: fake company, broken English, urgency, Western Union. Easy to spot. Easy to dismiss.

What replaced it is harder to see because it clears every surface check. Real LinkedIn profiles. Institutional credentials. Verified badges. Professional photos. Companies registered in places like Cyprus or Delaware, where opacity isn’t suspicious — it’s structural.

The AI hype cycle made this worse in three specific ways.

First, prestige signaling through buzzwords.
Roles get labeled “machine learning engineer,” “AI researcher,” or “reinforcement learning specialist” even when the work underneath is generic. The terminology pulls in people adjacent to the field who don’t yet have the context to spot when the role description doesn’t match the operation behind it.

Second, the rise of “AI recruiting platforms.”
Some of these systems are real. Many aren’t. The language overlaps just enough that it’s difficult to tell the difference between an actual hiring tool and a resume-harvesting funnel. The promise is efficiency. The output is data.

Third, remote work collapses geography as a warning sign.
A UK-based recruiter pitching a San Francisco role to someone who can work from anywhere no longer trips an alarm. Distributed teams are normal now. Jurisdictional incoherence gets waved through.

The result is a scam that doesn’t rely on deception so much as momentum. Each element on its own looks plausible. It’s only when you look at the system — how the pieces interact and what they’re optimized to collect — that the function becomes obvious.

These operations don’t need full buy-in. They just need a click. A form. An email address. A resume. Once that data is captured, the job itself is irrelevant.

Why This Matters

The harm isn’t abstract.

Resumes get ingested into databases you never consented to and can’t exit.
Emails and phone numbers get sold and resold.
Employment histories become targeting material.
LinkedIn activity trains algorithms to flag you as “open,” multiplying similar outreach.

Sometimes it escalates. Identification documents framed as background checks. Banking information framed as onboarding. Contracts that introduce fees only after commitment.

The data has value whether the job exists or not. That’s why the system works.

Horizon Accord is an independent research and publishing project focused on ethical AI, power literacy, and systems accountability.

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Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload