So I received an interesting bit of spam e-mail earlier this week. Someone from China, who identified themselves as working for a “consulting” company, inquired if I was willing to partake in a paid interview session where I am supposed to share my thoughts on the video game industry. They even quoted a rate of $250 an hour, unclear in what currency that is.
Shockingly though, the e-mail goes onto state the specifics of what they want me to share in the interview. Without going into too much detail, they were essentially asking me to divulge the business strategies and future plans for one of the games that my employer has recently released. Such information would be considered confidential and not for public consumption, yet this “consulting” company is clearly asking me to share this information in exchange for money. I am not exactly sure but this might also be illegal in some jurisdictions, for both the party offering the money and the party agreeing to divulge such information.
Part of me also thinks this just might be phishing scam. Between the e-mail address domain, the e-mail signature, and the contents of the e-mail body, three separate company names are used to identify the “consulting” company. Also, there appears to be little to no online presence for this company. So maybe they’re just trying to socially engineer some information from me.
In any case, I told my manager about this and they are trying to figure out who should look at this e-mail, perhaps someone in the legal department.