What’s a Tortoise?

So, yesterday I got contacted by the Corporate Communications Manager from IBM/Tivoli here in town, JUNE Bennett.

Or did I?  It seemed a bit odd to me, maybe it was the way JUNE feels the need to shout her first name in all correspondence. Maybe it was the weird career path she took from Marketing to Testing Engineer to a Corporate Manager in such a short time.  Maybe it was the fact that IBM had one manager for both corporate and technical communications.  Maybe it was the fact that this manager was also forced to pull double-duty as a technical recruiter.  Like, how screwed up is IBM that they can’t afford to go through one of the pimp agencies, but would rather have a non-technical communications manager interview potential nerds?

Well, it turned out, those leet skills I picked up spotting fake dating profiles on OKStupid have finally paid off.  After a bit of research, I quickly discovered that the role of JUNE was actually being played (I suspect, unwittingly) by actress Anna Fiorentini.  Thanks for choosing her actual headshot for the profile picture, scammer dude.  Saved me a lot of guesswork and facial recognition stuff.

Now, I would expect this kind of behavior (too-good-to-be-true profiles with unrealistically hot profile pictures) from a potential date on PlentyOfFreaks, but I’m not sure what the motivation here is, and not knowing the game, I’m somewhat reluctant to follow-through to see what the inevitable end of this con is. Nigerian princesses on Tinder? Oh yeah, we’ll milk that for weeks for entertainment value.  This?  It seems somewhat more sinister. Surely it’s not actually a recruiting tactic for lonely, gullible tech geeks?  Is that the demographic they want?  Obviously, it won’t result in an actual interview or job.  Wouldn’t people get suspicious that the gal who is trying to recruit them is never actually in the office?!  So, why use an actress’ easily-accessible headshot in the first place?  Seriously, am I suppose to fall for this ploy and take a position with a company just because the Communications Manager is smoking hot?  (Okay, I mean, fall for it AGAIN?!)  Wait … did I disqualify myself by figuring out the ploy?

Alternatively, I suppose it might be a social engineering setup to pump me for personal information for some other nefarious purpose.  If that’s the case, though, what do they expect to get that isn’t on my posted resume, blog, twitter feed, etc?

“So, Mr. Snider, I see you have ten years experience in business analysis, as well as a number of years as a developer designing and querying multivariate data cubes.  So, I suppose the only questions I have left for you are: What is your mother’s maiden name and What street did you grow up on?”

So, today, apparently whatever secret government project that failed to snare me with that trap has now upped their game with a new version.  In the middle of the night last night, I got an almost identical request from MICHELLE at Acosta.  Now, MICHELLE is a slightly improved model.  She actually has a degree from a local university and a few unrelated skills listed, which poor JUNE didn’t have.

Arguably if I wasn’t so paranoid now, and if Michelle hadn’t ALSO used all caps for her first name and been working diligently on recruiting people at 2:30AM, I would have allayed my suspicions that she’s a Voight Kampff flunkie. Unfortunately for this mysterious shadow organization, I  quickly identified MICHELLE as an iStock photo model I once had a boring Match.com lunch date with.

So this time we’re actually spending a little money and purchasing a profile photo instead of just lifting one.  Well played, scammer dudes.  Seriously, what is the nefarious purpose behind all of these fake profiles?  Even with the extra effort in the profile, they’re still less convincing than a Mall Santa.  Who are you people? Ex-girlfriends?  Nigerian 419 scammers?  Corporate spies? Government recruiters looking for people who can spot fake profiles?  Seriously, you obviously don’t know me, otherwise, you know you’d get further with a redhead and a sixpack of Bellhaven than you would by trying to trick me, right?

Actually, and here’s the odd thing about this all, I honestly would set up a fake profile — maybe using Matthew McConaughey as a profile pic — that perfectly parrots their job description just to figure out what this is.  However, I’m a little … shall we say … unrestful? … nervous? … by the fact that the spelling and grammar are flawless in the emails and posted material.  When the adversary doesn’t advertise their obtuseness in the first two lines, that adds a higher level of sinister and competence to this (well aside from the ALL CAPS first names).  Basically, I’m going to lose sleep until I figure out who is doing this, what are they after, and why are they targeting me?