Practice - July 2026
Impressed by your profile
The second of these in as many weeks landed in my LinkedIn inbox this week. Someone was "impressed" by my work on real-time gaming platforms, my Vue and Pixi experience, my AI tinkering. Flattering, specific, and lifted almost word for word from my own profile. That was the first thing that smelled a bit off - nobody who has actually read your work needs to recite it back to you.
The pitch was for a fractional CTO role at an AI-and-blockchain gaming venture, backed by "strong financial support", fully remote, full-time or part-time as I liked. I asked if they could share any more detail - role spec, salary, that kind of thing. What came back wasn't detail - it was a Calendly link and an invitation to book a call with a - quote unquote - hiring manager.
So I asked again for something concrete before booking anything. This time a "job description" (if you can call it that) turned up, in a Google Doc - not a careers page, because there wasn't one - for a company whose social channels had gone quiet six months earlier. 14 open roles at once, from fractional CTO down to executive assistant, the salaries eye-watering. The benefits section promised "transcendental meditation and a speech coach" (naturally), obviously copy-pasted from someone else's careers page and evidently never quite proof-read.
So, out of morbid curiosity, I went to have a look, as one does.
Just run my code
The lazy version of this just wastes your afternoon on a fake interview. The current one is nastier. It's a pattern researchers call the "contagious interview": you reach a "technical assessment", you're asked to clone a repo or run a small project to debug it, and the code you run quietly installs an info-stealer that goes looking for crypto wallets, passwords, keys - anything of value - and swipes the lot.
A look at the code on GitHub is usually enough. Base64 strings, nope. Obfuscated code, nope. Anything that has to hide what it's doing, nope.
I didn't book the call. I sent a polite no, reported the profile, and left it at that.
None of this is news - these have been doing the rounds for a while. I've just decided to post more, and this one seemed worth a mention.
They'll probably get a bit more clever than the current rigmarole: the initial praise, a hop off the platform to a Calendly link, a Google Doc instead of a real site, socials gone quiet for months, and the general eagerness to book the call before you've seen anything solid.
Either way, don't ever run a stranger's code on a machine where you keep anything you'd miss.
All writing - CV