Fake Jobs, Real Spies: China’s Online Recruitment Machine | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

**dee takos** (0:01)
Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of Eyes On Geopolitics. I'm joined today with Jonathan Hackett, and our special guest is Max Lesser. I'm gonna give you the official bio, because that's what like professionals do, Max. So this is what I'm gonna do. Max is a senior analyst on emerging threats at FDD Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation. Max previously served as head of US Policy Analysis and Engagement at Darktrace Federal, a cybersecurity company that specializes in AI.
Max research basically goes into a formal line influence, and it's been referenced by OpenAI and featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. And now he's in the big leagues with Eyes On Geopolitics podcast. Max, thanks for joining us.

**Max Lesser** (0:45)
Thank you.

**dee takos** (0:46)
Also, I do have to say he's a Harvard guy, so him and Jonathan had a little bit some words before the started recording, because of course, Jonathan's a Yale guy. He doesn't stop reminding us.
Max, I mean, you sent over some of your work and stuff like that. It's pretty incredible what's been going on over the last few years. Specifically, it's kind of like really scaled up, it seems, where essentially espionage has, there's like a new domain of espionage, and it's like gig economy workers and getting people like, you know, it seems like the scale has increased dramatically, right? Like it's not like an old crusty CIA case officer or MSS officer trying to recruit somebody in some European, you know, city or country. It's more online. And the key thing that I saw that was very interesting to me was, back in February of 2025, when a bunch of like federal workers were doged, essentially, you know, there was a bunch of, you know, a ton more people looking on the job market, obviously, after that. And it seems like China really did really put a lot of bandwidth into like trying to recruit those people as like consultants and then like, you know, maybe do a one off kind of, you know, report and then like kind of ask for a little bit more. That's a little bit sketchy and could be seen as you spying on your own country. So yeah, I mean, I don't even have a question. I just sort of super interesting and stuff like that. If you want to get into it, Max, and give us like the actual informed, the informed, like, you know, you know what you're talking about. So just give us, give us what you got essentially.

**Max Lesser** (2:28)
Yeah, no, I mean, there are so many different angles from which we could approach this conversation. I guess I'll start with how I started researching this. So, like you mentioned, in February 2025, just coincidentally, that was when my wife started looking for a job.
And she wasn't affected by layoffs or anything like that. And she was interested in geopolitical risk. So I was scrolling through LinkedIn, trying to help her look for geopolitical risk consulting jobs. And I came across one that was offering good pay. Seemed interesting. It was remote, which was obviously appealing.
And I had never heard about it before. And the LinkedIn presence was kind of sparse, right? Like there wasn't a law on its profile. And I looked at the website and I was like, hmm. There was just something that felt a little bit off about the website. Like my spidey senses went up. And as you mentioned, Dee, like one of my main focus areas when I started at Think Tank where I now work, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was formal line influence. So a lot of that's looking into covert networks on social media. But a huge part of it is also looking at fake websites, right? Fake news websites and things like that. So I sort of knew I had reflexes built to know how to investigate these sorts of or any sort of suspicious website.
And you can read this in my report. It's no big secret. They, whoever created this website was not super mindful of operational security because when I look at its who is information, which is sort of information that tells you about, tells you who registered a website, it showed that the registrant's country was in China. Like all, most of the information was redacted. But you could see that the registrant was based in China. And the consulting firm said that it was dual headquartered in Colorado, interestingly, in Singapore. So that didn't seem right. And that, you know, the investigation continued, that the thread started on spooling, like, and it took me to a broader network of, I believe it was around five or six different websites. And this was a sort of rare occasion with, even just with open sources, I was able to trace it back to a Chinese internet company, which I pretty conclusively was able to determine created that network.