Ask HN: Stopping YC backed business from advertizing fake jobs at my company

37 points by quacksilver 355 days ago | 12 comments

A business, claiming to be backed by YC is sending me 5 to 10 unsolicited job applications per day from candidates who have been told that my company in Vietnam is hiring.

I have no plans to hire anyone, not least in the roles that they applied for, and feel sorry that the candidates have wasted their time. Sending a spam application would put them on my blacklist anyway.

I am hesitant to reply to the emails as I thought they were some sort of phishing scam at first and would just mark me as a positive responder, resulting in more phishing / spam. Though I signed up with a fake email and it seems that they are actually trying to build a job site business at www.featurii.com.

The site asks users to connect their Gmail account then appears to spam me as the user, meaning that I can't just block the domain. I am also concerned about supposed mistreatment of candidates damaging my business image.

How would you approach getting them to stop?

IG_Semmelweiss 355 days ago |

Short-Term, just set up Gmail filters to catch emails with common keywords (“featurii.com” seems a dead giveaway and manually report these emails as spam to train Gmail’s AI.

Long-term, you need to go scorched earth. Review-bomb them on x, googlereviews, fb, alternativeto, etc. If you do it enough times you will get a VP's attention, and they will come to the negotiating table.

Also, worth a shot to report the issue to Google to investigate Gmail account misuse. Maybe even contact Customer Service directly if they have one, an underling may just want to care. Heck , most effective, have a lawyer friend lend you a company letterhead and have GPT send a fax/email to their registered agent or legal@ , with a cease and desist demanding they stop. Friends & vendors will put your script on letterhead free of charge.

quacksilver 354 days ago | |

Thanks

From a whois, it seems they are hosted by cloudflare and namecheap too, so I may write to them incase the site goes against any of their content / usage policies

xmodem 355 days ago |

YC has definitely backed some shady shit in the past, but I suspect these guys might just be straight-up fraudsters.

They claim to be backed by several major investors, but I can't find them in YC's startup directory [1] or Antler's portfolio page [2]. Their website also doesn't have any of the details you would typically expect from a legitimate business, such as an about us page, a description of their corporate history, or an office or mailing address.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies 2: https://www.antler.co/portfolio

quacksilver 354 days ago | |

Thanks! - I am now aware of those two lists

Agree about the lack of info

Peroni 355 days ago |

Create a stock response for candidates that are coming to you via their platform that explains they do not represent your company and that you will not review any applications that come via their platform. Include a link to your own careers page and encourage candidates to reapply there if they are genuinely interested in working for your company.

Have you tried contacting the company directly and asking them to remove your company details from their platform?

quacksilver 354 days ago | |

I have considered that, though I was not sure that letting a spammer know that your address is active and being read by a human was the best strategy, so thought I could make a HN thread to get suggestions / discuss how to act first.

People here seem to be relatively smart and clued up on the whole, and could suggest some things that I hadn't considered yet / create an interesting discussion for others to read.

K0balt 355 days ago |

If this isn’t just an actual scam campaign, it Sounds like a class action lawsuit waiting to happen? Shame on these guys one way or another, the last thing people looking for work need is yet another layer of friction.

trollbridge 355 days ago |

"1 minute to apply to 5,000+ premiere hiring companies."

The proliferation of these types of services is to make the job-application process essentially useless.

infecto 355 days ago |

Took all of 5 seconds to look at the YC company list to see they are not in it.

Just some Vietnamese spam site, who knows the motives. Setup email filters and move on.

quacksilver 354 days ago | |

Thanks! - I wasn't sure where the definitive list was, or if they could be using some other brand name that wasn't their company name on the list.

Posting here to see if anyone else had encountered them before seemed a reasonable first step.

Aeolun 355 days ago |

Send the company an email politely asking them to piss off?

If not, send all the candidates a message saying you do not hire through unsolicited recruitment. Or set an autoresponder saying the same to any unsolicited message about an open position.

ChrisMarshallNY 355 days ago |

I would think, that if they are actually YC-backed, then mentioning them to the YC folks could have some effect.

Even if they aren't actually YC-backed, I think YC should know.

Suspect they know now.

Good luck.