When Ken Griffin calls to offer you a job at Citadel it may not be him

If Ken Griffin really likes you and really wants to hire you for Citadel, his hedge fund, he might interview you personally. He might journey to see you. Maybe he will even call you and offer you the job. Griffin is famously said to have called Jon Arnold, the former head of Enron's gas trading team in 2002, in an attempt to hire him for the fund. Former Citadel CTO Umesh Subramanian also declared a partiality for calling "in-demand" candidates he wanted to hire.

But the call may not be from Ken, or from anyone else at Citadel. Similarly, if you receive a call from the likes of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan, Steve Cohen at Point72 or Jonathan Gray at Blackstone, begging you to join, you should be circumspect. Events of yesterday suggest that telephone calls are not always what they seem. 

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Two Sigma, Citadel, Millennium and several private equity firms were attacked by hackers using voice phishing. The Financial Times said the attacks involved impersonations of 'a trusted person or colleague through phone calls.' The firms involved did not appear to have been breached and have not commented for this article.

The audio phishing attack was unrelated to recruitment, but given the explosion of recruitment scams in the financial services sector, it's not inconceivable that the next level will involve Griffin calling with a job if you first wire him $1k. JPMorgan's chief AI recruiter in London already claimed someone was impersonating him (by email) a few weeks ago. Point72 has been targeted by recruitment scammers for nearly a decade. 

Google noted earlier this year that scammers had begun appropriating "high-fidelity audio artifacts to impersonate authoritative figures." Senior financial services figures like Griffin, Dimon and Gray feature frequently in podcasts and on YouTube, making cloning their voices easy.

The era of the executive podcast may therefore be coming to an end. Either that, or there will soon be thousands of them, each generated by an AI explaining how to get a job at Citadel or JPMorgan in the voices of senior leaders.

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