AI Found Me a Board Seat. AI Also Almost Scammed Me.

Regular readers know the first half of this story. A CEO was searching for board directors, AI surfaced my name, and he reached out. I called that exciting, with a little bit of scary mixed in.

Last week I got the scary half, minus the exciting part.

A recruiter named Mary Lou emailed me. She was working two mandates for mining companies, she said, and thought I might be a fit. I said I was interested. She asked a few warm-up questions, geography, company size, the kind of board I wanted to sit on, the sort of thing any recruiter asks before getting serious. I did what I tell my students to do before taking anyone seriously: I looked her up. LinkedIn profile, check. Five thousand-plus connections, check. HR consulting background, based in Florida, doing exactly the kind of recruiting work she claimed. It held up.

Then the mandates arrived. Two documents, two different companies, two board positions, and both of them fit me like they had been written by someone holding my resume in one hand. This read as more than “she's clearly qualified.” It read as “someone reverse-engineered this from my LinkedIn.” I noticed it, filed it under maybe I'm just a strong candidate, and kept going.

I told her I was interested in both. That is when the pitch changed shape. Her reply was warm, encouraging, “we'd love to have you”, and then the ask: send everything. Resume, bio, cover letter, the works. Oh, and she happened to know an executive expert who could help me polish those materials first, to make sure they were “correct.”

That line is what stopped me, more than the mandates, more than the coincidence, more than the too-perfect fit. My only verification of this recruiter so far was a LinkedIn scroll, and here she was already steering me toward a stranger who wanted my full executive package, and presumably a fee.

So instead of sending anything, I fed the whole thread into Claude. Both mandates, both emails, the ask at the end. I asked it to tell me what it saw.

It told me this was a fraud. And it told me something I had yet to check: the real Mary Lou, whoever built the profile borrowed her name and background from, died four years ago. Someone was operating a recruiting scam under a dead woman's identity, using details almost certainly pulled from my own LinkedIn to make the mandates feel handcrafted for me.

Sit with that for a second. Two AI experiences, a few months apart.

One put a real board opportunity in front of a real CEO. The other built a convincing fake around a stolen identity, aimed squarely at me, using my own public information as the raw material.

Here is the part I keep turning over: LinkedIn is exactly why the CEO found me, and LinkedIn is exactly what the scammer used to build a lure I nearly swallowed whole. Same platform, same visibility, opposite outcomes. I have spent years telling my students to be findable, post the background, show the experience, let the algorithm work for you. Saying that today comes with a caveat attached.

I am genuinely considering stripping my LinkedIn down to the essentials, name, headline, “resume available upon request”, and inviting people to come to me directly instead of handing my whole professional history to anyone who wants to build a costume out of it. To be clear, this is my personal call to make, and yours is entirely your own. This might be an overreaction. It might be exactly right. I am still weighing which one it is, and I think that honesty is the most useful thing I can offer you this week.

Here is what I am confident about:

AI cuts both ways in this search process, and it's moving faster than our instincts for it. It can find you a board seat. It can also power the con that is trying to steal your identity and your money. The tools for catching that, like handing a suspicious email straight to Claude and asking it to pull the thread apart, are just as available to us as they are to the people running the scams. Use them.

AI adds real value here, and it works best paired with our own verification. It used to be enough to check that a LinkedIn profile existed, that the connections were there, that the background lined up. Today calls for more. Real due diligence means asking AI to stress-test the paperwork, and it means picking up the phone and using our own network, calling someone who would actually know this person, checking references the old-fashioned way, confirming through a genuinely independent source. Taking things at face value carries far more risk than it used to.

I will keep thinking out loud with you about where the line should sit between visible and vulnerable. For now: do your due diligence, verify the recruiter through your own network as well as AI, question the too-perfect fit, and reserve your executive materials for people you have actually gotten on the phone.