Category: Web Life

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Something came up

Over the past few years I’ve run a lot of professional learning workshops for teachers. It’s been a joy to be part of the learning journey for educators as they discover new ideas for making a difference to the kids they teach. I couldn’t count the number of workshop sessions I’ve run, or the number of ideas we’ve shared, but it’s quite a lot. And even when I’m training on the same topics over and over again, every workshop is still different because of the collection of people and personalities in the room.

There is, however, one disturbing characteristic that too many of these workshops have in common, and that is the complete predictability of people who register to attend a workshop and then simply don’t turn up. Even when workshops are offered as part of a conference that people have paid good money to attend, you can still predictably count on a no-show rate of around 5% to 10%. There are no doubt some valid reasons that people might pay to attend an event and then not show up – unexpected things happen, your kids get sick, emergencies arise, etc – so I completely understand that expecting everyone to turn up to anything is unrealistic. 

What surprises me is how dramatically this changes when the event is free. I’ve been involved in putting together events for teachers, where we never charge anything to attend.  They are completely free. We put a lot of work into running them, we arrange and pay for catering, we book venues, and often pay for professional trainers to deliver the workshops. And we know that for the people who attend they get a great deal out of coming along and learning with us.

The thing that baffles me a bit is when people register to attend a free event and don’t show up. It honestly astounds me. When an event is offered at no cost I would estimate that the no-show rate rises to about 50%. I some cases it rises much higher, and I’ve even seen it rise to 100%.  You read that right. I’ve seen free events where literally nobody who registered turns up. Baffling. And so damn rude.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I think if you register to attend something, then you should turn up. Not just for PD workshops either, but for life in general… If say you’re going to be somewhere, then you should be there. It’s just a common courtesy to the people who put so much time, energy and money into running an event. I’m sure some people think that a “free” event costs nothing. Not so.  While it may cost nothing to them, there are considerable costs involved in making a “free” event happen, including catering, venue hire, personnel, swag, to say nothing of the time it takes to organise.  

With free events, many people feel it’s ok to register and not show up, because they simply have no skin in the game. I’m betting that people who pay thousands of dollars to attend a Tony Robbins conference all show up. Yet I could confidently predict that most free events will have about half of those who register not show up. I know it’s just human nature, but it’s a pretty disappointing aspect of human nature. I understand it’s going to happen, but please don’t be “that person” who registers for something and then vanishes with no warning.

Please, if you say you’re going to do something, do it. Whether it’s a tech workshop, a family function, a kids party or a meeting with a friend. If you say you’re going to be somewhere, be there. And if something comes up, and you can’t be there, please have the courtesy to let someone know so that the organisers know who to expect, or even so your place can be offered to someone else.

It’s just common courtesy.

Posted on

Dear family and friends,

You may (or may not) have noticed that I barely spend any time on Facebook these days. Today is the first time I’ve logged in for quite a while, and although I have definitely missed hearing what some of you have been up to and keeping up with your goings-on, I have to say I have really not missed “the Facebook experience”.

I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with Facebook… I know there can be some great stuff happening there, but I was increasingly finding Facebook as a huge time suck that was stealing more and more hours of my life for very little real return. I, probably like you, have spent far too much of my life liking and commenting on other people’s posts, watching inane videos, or observing some of humanity’s ugliest sides in many of the discussion threads.

I was becoming more and more disenchanted with the whole Facebook experience, so I just decided to stop using it. If you’ve read my blog you will know that I’ve got to this point in the past, where I’ve ranted about it, even deleted my account, etc, but I now realise it was far more about how I used Facebook than Facebook itself. (Although I still have many concerns about the way Facebook does things and the many unethical ways it deals with user data).

I do find Facebook useful as a single sign-on tool for other web services, and that is one reasons I have kept my account active. The other main reason is you… I am connected to many people here on Facebook, and I consider most of you friends. However, I’ve seen less of most of you over the last few years than ever before, and if that’s what it means to have friends these days, then it’s not enough for me. I’ve fallen into the trap of having friends in online spaces like Facebook at the expense of having friends in actual meetspace.

I have to say that since I have deliberately been avoiding Facebook, I’ve been happier, fitter, healthier, and have spent more time doing more things that I like doing. I’ve read more, exercised more, travelled more, and used some of that time to learn a new language. (In fact, the loading page in Duolingo actually says “15 minutes a day can help you learn a new language, what does 15 minutes on social media give you?”) It turns out that I was spending WAY more than 15 minutes a day on social media, and the truth is I was getting very little back from it.

I know some of you love Facebook and get great value from it, so good luck to you. Facebook is not all bad and for many of you it helps you remain connected with people you care about. I’m glad it works for you.

For me, it became a case of the more connected I became, the more disconnected I felt. I decided that there is a whole real world out there that is far more interesting and more deserving of my time than Facebook. I’m glad we are friends, and I’m glad that I can stay connected to you in some way, but it will be far less on Facebook. If you want to know what’s going on in my life, I’d much rather you call, or have lunch, or meet for a drink, or go for a walk together, or something…

I still like social media, I just don’t want it to be a permanent proxy for my real life.

Crossposted to Facebook