Back in April, I wrote about the despicable practice of fake job postings. These are “employment” ads that end up being nothing more than come-ons from career-marketing services that can charge up to $10,000.

Now there appear to be more people seeking to make a profit off of job seekers: Recruiters selling your resume to other recruiters or companies.

Apparently people post fake job ads to garner 1,000 or more resumes and then sell those resumes to other recruiters.

Larry Chaffin, writing in a blog for NetworkWorld, did an experiment to check this story out. He and some partners created three fake resumes from a CIO-type to an entry-level employee. He explained,

“We looked at the positions that stated remote position\work from home office with a national telecommunication company or Fortune 100 companies. Also we applied for architect, engineer, and executive jobs as well. We applied for around 70 jobs and on some of them we made sure we had the experience they wanted. Being just right or over qualified you would think we would get a call, but no, we got emails saying, “Sorry but you did not meet the qualifications of the position.”

Within three days, they started to get emails and calls to their temp cell phone from people they didn’t know in regard to jobs for which they hadn’t applied. In the calls, people said they were forwarded the resume. Calls and emails started coming in from India, China, Canada, and other countries. One recruiter in Canada even admitted that he bought one of the resumes after it had been fully vetted, and a background check had been done.

It might not be a bad thing to have your resume circulated around; it could be, however, if you don’t want certain people knowing you’re looking. I don’t see a problem with recruiters paying for a service that delivers fully vetted resumes, but the fact that these people post fake job ads to draw in those resumes really rankles me.