Earlier this year Fortune unveiled two strange, related scams aimed at the private equity and venture capital industries: One involving fake recruiting firms called Prelude Recruiting and Renaissance Recruiting, a fake VC firm called Sienna Ventures, and the other involving a fake venture capital firm called Asenqua Ventures.
Fortune’s Dan Primack reported on the motive for these scams at the time:
One possibility is that Sienna Ventures was designed to obtain digital signatures and uniform resumes of U.S. professionals in order to sell them as part of some type of identity fraud scam. One individual’s information has little value, but a package of identities is another story.
If ATS Resume was indeed involved, then the perpetrator(s) also obtained some money and at least partial digits of user credit cards (ATS Resume utilized e-commerce software provider Shopify, which does not provide merchants with full credit card information).
And none of that still explains the Asenqua situation, which we hypothesized could have been intended to create the illusion of U.S. legitimacy to an overseas investment scheme.
The recruiting scam appears to be back in the form of a new firm called Lynn Recruitment LLC. (It’s separate from a legit firm called Lynn Recruitment in the UK.)
The firm appears to be using a similar email scheme — an attempt to extract a small fee and possibly steal identity data from job-seekers, according to Fortune tipsters, and pairing it with a PR Newswire press release to make itself appear legitimate. At least one of the bios of the professionals listed does not check out. PR Newswire has since pulled its release about the firm. Emails to Lynn Recruitment have not been returned.
