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Rough Diamond – A scammer’s story

Here’s a fun little story about some scammy stuff that just happened to me on LinkedIn.

I’m currently looking around for either a new role or just some more work opportunities for next year, so I made a post on LinkedIn to say so. Within moments of making that post I received a number of responses from people, mostly recruiters and HR folk. Most of them just hit Like on my post, but one in particular, a young lady named Diamond Alex, reached out to me. According to her LinkedIn profile, this young recruitment specialist was based in Atlanta Georgia.

She suggested she might have some opportunities for me and asked that I send my resumé. I did so, and she got back to me very quickly after looking at it. She responded by telling me that my resumé could be improved (something I completely agree with) and that it should be ATS compliant (Applicant Tracking System, a standard that makes your resumé work better with most HR databases.) So that all sounded very sensible to me.

She then recommended I enlist the services of a professional resumé writer, who she referred to as “the expert”, and said he would be able to restructure my resumé to make it better. While I agree that getting some expert help might be a good idea in principle, I was immediately wary. I clicked on the link she sent to Fiverr page of “the expert” and she urged me to immediately request they start to work on it. I don’t generally trust this kind of pushy recommendation, so I told her I would prefer someone based in Australia. She assured me that this writer, who she explicitly told me was based in the United States, could do a great job and that they work with clients all over the world. A closer look at this writer’s Fiverr profile showed that their location was not the USA, but Nigeria. I told her this and then she conceded that, yes, he was based in Nigeria, but that didn’t really count because he did some work for her US company.



In this link she sent for this “expert writer”, who despite having a Fiverr account created in August 2024, she insisted had been doing work for her for several years, there were absolutely no reviews of his work. I thought that was odd. She responded by sending a screenshot of a bunch of positive reviews from her phone, although the screenshot did not show the username of the person receiving the reviews and could have been for anyone. I dug around a little more on Yus_B’s profile and did find another page for this same person that had some reviews, although many people mentioned that this “expert writer” had made many typos and grammar mistakes in the work he had allegedly done for them.

This was already more than enough red flags to have me walk away, but I was curious to see how far this would go, and I have a childish desire to just keep wasting scammer’s time, so I kept the conversation going. We swatted back and forth for a bit, with me getting more and more picky about the holes in her story, and her trying to have an answer for everything. For example, I asked why, if she was in Atlanta, was she up at 1:00am? She did not address that. I asked her why, if she was an experienced recruiter, was she connected to only three people on LinkedIn. No response to that point. I then uploaded her quite attractive profile photo to Google reverse image search, only to find that (surprise, surprise!) it’s a stock image being used in many places all over the internet.


It was at this point I suggested to her (him?) that she was not all she appeared to be, to which she responded by quickly deleting her LinkedIn profile before I could report it.

I already have a pretty dim view of most “recruitment specialists” even at the best of times. There’s a lot of HR vultures out there, but you really do need to be careful of the scammers and liars, even on a very HR focused platform like LinkedIn.

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Ex-Twitter

Back in 2006, when the world was being inundated with a flood of new social and web 2.0 tools, I signed up for a brand new thing called Twitter. It was an interesting, although somewhat bizarre idea: write short text blasts of up to 120 characters, telling the world (or whoever might read it) what you were doing. At the time, Twitter gathered its fair share of ridicule for the inanity of the idea. Critics would claim that nobody needed to know what you were eating for breakfast, or really, to know anything about what you were doing at all.

In those early days, Twitter was mostly filled with geeks and tech bros, posting about all kinds of vacuous stuff. Most people I know, including myself, joined Twitter (user number 779,452), didn’t really get it, then left. Like many others, I eventually came back. In those exciting early days, there was no ability to reply to a tweet. There were no images in tweets. There was no search function to find a tweet. Of course that changed over time, and these functions were gradually added. With the addition of search in Twitter, we saw the rise of the hashtag, a community-devised way to aggregate tweets around a particular topic or idea. Twitter eventually doubled the character limit from 120 characters (a limit originally imposed by the 140 character limit of SMS messaging, which old timers might recall Twitter was originally connected to), to 240 characters. Still short, but it made a world of difference in the way people expressed themselves in these short, but now a bit longer, blasts of thought.

Twitter evolved from people sharing inane topics like what they had for lunch, and became a genuine voice of the masses. It democratised communication and formed communities of like minded people who could find their tribe. It became a platform, no, THE platform, that genuinely changed the world. It aided with revolutions, emergencies, political uprisings, and more, and gave a voice to those who may never have been able to find a voice otherwise. It was the town square, on a global scale.

In its glory days, Twitter was the most incredible platform for connecting people and forming communities. I think educators, probably more than most others, really understood the power of what these communities could bring, and Twitter became synonymous with developing a PLN. There’s no doubt that, at least for most educators I know, Twitter was the major force in driving positive change and global connection on a scale not seen before.

And then it changed. The advertisers came along. The money came along. The political manipulation came along. And then Elon Musk came along. What started out as an amazing global town hall, eventually devolved into a greedy cesspit of inhumanity, more polarised, more obnoxious, more divided than ever. Gone were the days of people finding their tribe. Instead, people were dividing into opposing tribes and hurling insults and abuse at each other. It became impossible to have a civil conversation on Twitter, or X as Elon renamed it. Truth and facts became optional. It stopped being a place where people connected, and became a place where those with the loudest voices could simply shout into the void without any expectation of finding a response, making a connection or starting a conversation.

I used to really like Twitter. I was active on it a lot. It opened doors for me. It allowed me to find and meet my heroes. I wrote many posts about Twitter, explaining why it mattered, how it worked, and convincing others to give it chance, even if it seemed like a weird idea. It was the one social network that I felt had true value, and the one I would hang onto long after I let the others go. I believed in the people there, because I saw Twitter as giving us all a voice, democratising our ability to connect and share and learn together.

But enough is enough. I have been hanging onto Twitter/X for nostalgia more than utility. Despite having nearly 12,000 followers I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a proper exchange of ideas or a conversation. There are too many extremists, bullies, idiots, egotists. There’s probably still good stuff there, but I no longer see it. My replies tab is full of ads and random tweets from people I don’t even follow. In short, the Twitter I knew and loved is dead. It’s such a shame.

So, regretfully, I’ve decided I’m pulling the plug and deleting my account. The tool that mattered so much and helped me to become a “connected educator” is no longer connecting me to the people and ideas that matter to me.

It’s hard to believe that I will no longer be a Twitter user. I will no longer be an X user. I guess that makes me an Ex-Twitter user.

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22,224 Days

30 years ago, I lost my dad. He was at home with mum after a long day at work, when someone came to the front door and shot him. Just like that. He died several hours later in St George hospital from blood loss due to ballistic trauma.

It was an agonising experience for our whole family. We all eventually came to terms with what happened, although I think we all dealt with it in very different ways. Dad was a completely innocent victim in what turned out to be a ghastly case of mistaken identity. To cut a very long story, a hitman by the name of Paul Thomas Crofts had been paid to shoot a underworld gangland figure named Danny Karam, as a warning for some shady stuff he was doing. Of course, there is a whole story behind it and how it came to happen, and the investigations into his murder went on for several years through several court cases and mistrials, but in the end the investigations exposed some pretty big time drug and crime syndicates that were operating around Kings Cross.

Of course, this was not obvious at the start, and it took a long time to work out the details of what happened and who was responsible. And why. We asked why a lot. Those years of not having an explanation for what happened were very difficult for everyone. After it happened, nobody really understood why, and everyone was under suspicion including our own family. As the investigation proceeded, the detectives started to piece together a complex puzzle that eventually led to the truth. There were many layers in the investigation that I won’t go into here, but in the end, getting the full story and being able to put the pieces together and understand what happened was at least some consolation.

Sydney Morning Herald February 25, 1993

At the time, I was 30 and dad was 60. I used to think 60 was old, but now that I’m also 60, I realise just how young 60 really is.

I wanted to note this on my blog today because I worked out that from April 20 1932, the day my dad was born in Lviv Poland, to February 23 1993, the day he died in Sydney, he had been alive for exactly 22,224 days.

Today, December 3, 2023, is 22,224 days since I was born on January 28 1963. Today, I have been alive for the same amount of time that my father was alive. I still feel young. And I’m sure my dad felt young at this age too, but tomorrow I get to wake up and live my 22,225th day, something he did not get the chance to do.

We feel so invincible most of the time, and most of us live as though we have all the time in the world. But life is so fragile. You never know what’s around the corner, be it a serious illness, an unfortunate accident , or some idiot who gets an address wrong and shoots you by mistake. Don’t take life for granted. Spend it doing things you love with people you care about.

Live every day as though it is your last, because one day it will be. And as cliche as that might sound, stop and think how you’re spending your time. How did you spend your day today? Because if you don’t get to wake up tomorrow morning, I truly hope you get to say you spent yesterday living like it was your last.