I receive a lot of recruiter emails that are basically spam. However, once in a while I ask them where they got my information, because I don’t have my info available anywhere right now.Well, today I got one of those emails and just happened to ask where they got my information. The recruiter responded and said they got my information from CareerBuilder.com. This sounded odd to me because I didn't recall ever using that website, but I knew it was a big name brand. I double checked all my records and emails, and sure enough, I had never used CareerBuilder.com and did not have a username or password.Since they are a big-name brand, I decided to navigate to their website and try the password reset function and sure enough, it worked. Alarmingly, there it was, plain as day, a CareerBuilder account with all of my employment history and a lot of personal details. Clearly, all the information had been scraped from other sources because there were a lot of errors and gaps in the data. Let me be clear, I did not create this account and the data was clearly scraped.This is particularly alarming because not only was CareerBuilder unethically creating an account on my behalf, scraping my employment history, and selling my data to third parties, but they were also misrepresenting me in the marketplace. They took it upon themselves to take this disheveled amalgamation of scraped data, call it a "resume", and share it with potential employers and recruiters.What CareerBuilder did is clearly fraud. They created an account without my consent and effectively impersonated me in the marketplace. This was scary and appalling.I have reported this to the FTC and the CCPA. If they did this to you, or something similar, also report it to the FTC or CCPA. If this isn’t illegal, it should be.
