Might this be a scam?
from MrLLM@ani.social to programming@programming.dev on 01 Jun 12:46
https://ani.social/post/32422900

Hey guys, I’d like your input on this.

I’ve just received this email for a collaboration proposal, which I don’t think looks sketchy at all.

For a bit more of context, I’m a CS college student about to graduate, and I decided to build a portfolio with academic projects and a small CV which I hosted in GitHub pages.

I’d normally not answer because they send me emails to my non visible email, but this one is on my public email (and wasn’t flagged as spam, could be that both are gmail?).

I googled their email and found what a think it’s their GitHub profile, name and location check out, however they don’t have any repository nor commits.

What should I do? Is this an scam?

#programming

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panda_abyss@lemmy.ca on 01 Jun 12:58 next collapse

It feels a little sketchy to me.

The big question I’d want to know is if this is something where they use your face/communication to hide outsourcing work without the consent or knowledge of a company.

If that’s the case you could be on the hook for legal issues, but I think you’d be able to figure it out.

It’s also a tracked email from some service, so just beware that it’s probably not an individual sending these (how often do you use a third party email pixel when you email someone? This implies a pipeline of many people you want to iterate on).

And then while it’s fakeable using LLMs, they haven’t mentioned why YOUR profile is appealing, so it just seems mass spam to me.

MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip on 01 Jun 13:37 collapse

I mean, if your address already is on Github, nothing is lost by answering.

I’m planning a larger open source project (yeah, for a while now) and have a list of potential collaborators i want to ask then. Or is that a bad idea, unprofessional or something?

UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world on 01 Jun 13:48 collapse

I think it seems much more professional if you get concrete right away. More concrete than ‘I have a project’ anyway. Tell them roughly what the project is about, what role you think they can fill and why you think so.

If you write a generic mail like the one OP posted, it just seems like random spam