A troubling trend is on the rise: scammers are registering domains that look nearly identical to legitimate company websites, then using them to send fraudulent offer letters or trick applicants into sharing personal information.

For organizations that recruit online or handle sensitive candidate data, the impact can be serious—both in terms of brand reputation and applicant trust. The good news is there are proactive steps you can take to reduce risk and respond quickly if it happens to you.

Start with Candidate Warnings

One of the most effective ways to protect applicants is to warn them directly. Posting a visible security advisory on your careers page and in job postings makes it harder for scammers to succeed.

Here’s sample wording you can adapt:

This simple step builds trust with candidates and helps them identify red flags before sharing sensitive information.

Defensive Domain Registration

Another important strategy is defensive domain registration—sometimes called domain name blocking. This means purchasing common variations of your domain name so that bad actors can’t use them to impersonate your brand.

While it’s impossible to buy every variation, covering the most likely ones goes a long way. Think of it as sealing off the obvious entry points.

What to Register

1. Common Top-Level Domain (TLD) Variations
   • Primary: brightpathconsulting.com
   • Variants: brightpathconsulting.net, brightpathconsulting.org, brightpathconsulting.co, brightpathconsulting.biz, brightpathconsulting.info, brightpathconsulting.us
   • International: Add .ca, .uk, .in if you recruit globally
2. Misspellings & Typosquatting
   • britepathconsulting.com
   • brightpatconsulting.com
   • brightpathconsalting.com
   • Dropped/added letters: brightpathconsultinng.com, brighpathconsulting.com
3. Hyphenated Variants
   • bright-path-consulting.com
   • brite-path-consulting.com
4. Career & Recruiting Variants
   • brightpathconsultingjobs.com
   • brightpathconsultingcareers.com
   • workatbrightpath.com
   • joinbrightpath.com
5. Email Security Variants
   • brightpathhr.com
   • brightpath-recruiting.com
   • brightpathapply.com

Even if you don’t use these domains for your own websites, owning them prevents scammers from sending fake recruiting emails. Once purchased, simply redirect them to your official career site URL.

Search Visibility and SEO Defense

It’s important to understand how scammers are actually reaching applicants. In some cases, their fraudulent postings may be outcompeting legitimate roles in search results. They might be showing up higher on Google, Indeed, or LinkedIn. Increasingly, they could even appear in AI-powered searches like Perplexity or ChatGPT, where job seekers are turning for quick answers.

Depending on those dynamics, companies may need to pursue a range of countermeasures. One strategy is to partner with job boards directly, especially if those boards are unintentionally directing traffic to impostor domains. Another is to adjust SEO parameters on the company’s own career site to ensure it leapfrogs the fraudulent listings and consistently ranks above them.

Organizations can also push out additional career-related pages or use company-owned domains to expand their legitimate footprint in search. Alongside that, it’s smart to publish a dedicated web page or blog post highlighting the scam itself. When that callout page is indexed, it gives candidates a visible warning in search results — ideally before they even click into the wrong site.

By combining SEO adjustments, stronger partnerships with job boards, and proactive publishing, employers can make sure their official content consistently outranks the impostors and that warnings are seen early in a candidate’s journey.

(Thanks to Adam Treitler for these insights.)

Layered Security Measures

Defensive domains are a strong start, but they’re even more effective when combined with other protective steps:

• Trademark monitoring with services like MarkMonitor or BrandShield to alert you to suspicious domains.
• Google Alerts for “[Your Company] jobs” or “[Your Company] careers” to spot fraudulent postings.
• Email authentication records (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) so recipients can verify legitimate company emails.
• Consistent messaging in job postings and offer letters that clarifies what your company will—and will not—ask applicants.

Responding When It Happens

If someone does set up a fake domain impersonating your company, there are legal and operational paths to shut it down:

1. UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy)
   File a complaint to transfer a domain that is confusingly similar to your trademark and used in bad faith.
2. Court Action (ACPA in the U.S.)
   The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act allows lawsuits to reclaim domains and seek damages.
3. Cease-and-Desist Letters
   A formal legal notice can sometimes get registrars or hosting providers to suspend the site.
4. Abuse Complaints
   Registrars and hosts have abuse channels where fraud and phishing can be reported for faster takedowns.
5. Email & Security Reporting
   Report phishing domains to Gmail, Outlook, and other providers—they often blacklist them quickly.

Final Thoughts

Scammers may be getting smarter, but organizations don’t have to be defenseless. By combining candidate education, defensive domain registration, and layered security practices, companies can significantly reduce the risk of fraud while maintaining the trust of applicants and protecting their brand.