Hey guys, I’d like your input on this.
I’ve just received this email for a collaboration proposal, which I don’t think looks sketchy at all.
For a bit more of context, I’m a CS college student about to graduate, and I decided to build a portfolio with academic projects and a small CV which I hosted in GitHub pages.
I’d normally not answer because they send me emails to my non visible email, but this one is on my public email (and wasn’t flagged as spam, could be that both are gmail?).
I googled their email and found what a think it’s their GitHub profile, name and location check out, however they don’t have any repository nor commits.
What should I do? Is this an scam?
Edit: I asked for clarification at the risk of being targeted for spam, and I received a reply within 5 minutes. It’s basically a job to do interviews and meetings. There are a few things that I didn’t find clear, like, who will I be representing during meeting/interviews among other things.
Anyways, I’ll probably decline since it’ll too much for me as a first part time job.
Thank y’all who replied
Yes, this is 100% a scam or rather, fraud (and may be illegal where you live).
He explains the con right in the follow-up email.
Let's break this down.
He gets people who would have nice resumes (or profiles,.. like a young fella fresh outta college) to apply for tech jobs. He's looking specifically for US tech jobs because of the "high rate" in which he means the jobs pay a high hourly rate/wage.
Once the company hires you, you subcontract (aka pay him) to do the work. Of course he's probably going to say something like, well you keep 20% of the "high rate" for yourself.
The following is only speculation
Since he's asking you about interviews and team meetings, I have a feeling he's not getting a lot of success recruiting "collaborators" in the US and likely thinks getting someone already in the US to recruit other will be easier (no language barrier, no international issue, etc). Having an American front man for this scam is likely going to make recruitment easier.
Yeah, definitely sketchy, I’m glad I asked here.