The Vigilante Who's Taking Down Recruitment Scammers, One Fake Job Ad at a Time

| Photography by Evan Jenkins for WSJ

Sept. 22, 2026 7:55 pm ET

A smiling woman named Linda Anthony wants to hire you. Jay Jones is convinced she is a bot trying to scam you.

Jones says he first encountered her on LinkedIn one evening just after midnight. Her title on the platform: “Contract Recruiter” at “Confidential Jobs,” based in Smyrna, Ga. He found her clone, “Linda Anthony,” a “Contract Specialist” also at “Confidential Jobs”—this time in California.

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Lindsay Ellis is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Before joining the Journal in 2022, she was a senior reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, covering college finance and governance, as well as higher education's response to Covid-19. There, her coverage of public-university boards earned a finalist designation for the Dateline Award for Investigative Journalism for the D.C. Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She also has reported about higher education and business at the Houston Chronicle and the Albany Times-Union.

Lindsay began her career as an intern in the Atlanta bureau of the Journal, covering U.S. and corporate news.