For journalists
and partners.

What is TruJob?

TruJob is a Chrome extension that catches recruitment scams in Gmail and LinkedIn before job seekers respond to them. It launches December 26, 2026.

TruJob is built for individual job seekers, including paid workers, cash and informal workers, and workers in higher-vulnerability situations who are often excluded from existing anti-fraud tools. There is no recruiter-facing product. There is no enterprise version.

The product is freemium. The free tier protects the core use case. A Pro tier adds higher-volume scanning and additional features. There are no plans to monetize through user data or advertising.

One-sentence description

TruJob is an AI-powered Chrome extension that catches recruitment scams in Gmail and LinkedIn before job seekers respond, built for every kind of worker.

Two-sentence version

TruJob is an AI-powered Chrome extension that scans recruiter outreach in Gmail and LinkedIn for scam patterns and alerts users before they reply. Founded in 2026 by a former Verizon engineer after his own near-miss with a recruiter scam, TruJob is built to protect every kind of worker, including those in informal and cash-based work who are often excluded from anti-fraud tools.

Key facts

About the founder

Colin Malcolm is a former Verizon software engineer turned senior UX researcher.

Longer bio

Colin Malcolm started his career as a software engineer at Verizon and grew into UX research. In late 2025, Verizon laid off approximately 13,000 employees in a mass restructuring. Colin was among them.

While job searching, he experienced his own near-miss with a recruiter scam. A "recruiter" reached out about a senior role, asked for personal information almost immediately, and called him within minutes of his first reply. He hung up and started building what would become TruJob shortly after.

TruJob LLC was incorporated in April 2026. Colin is the sole founder.

Available for interviews on

• Recruitment scam patterns and how they have evolved
• The design of consumer-facing trust and safety products
• Privacy architecture decisions for tools that handle email content
• The experience of building a company while job searching after a layoff
• Why anti-fraud tools historically exclude informal and cash-based workers

Why this matters

Recruitment scams have grown significantly in the last several years. The Federal Trade Commission received over 105,000 job scam reports in 2024, with reported losses over $501 million. The actual figure is likely several times higher because most victims never report.

The patterns have become more sophisticated. AI-generated recruiter messages, fake company websites that mirror real employers, and elaborate multi-stage onboarding scams now target candidates across every industry and experience level.

TruJob exists because the response to this problem has been uneven. Existing anti-fraud tools focus on financial transactions or general phishing, not on the specific patterns of recruitment scams. They also typically require the user to have a formal employment relationship and an organized job search, which excludes many of the workers most often targeted.

What makes TruJob different

Built for every kind of worker

Most anti-scam tools are designed around the assumption that the user has formal employment history, structured financial accounts, and a clear job search trajectory. TruJob's design intentionally includes workers who fall outside those patterns: gig workers, informal workers, cash workers, and people in higher-vulnerability situations.

Privacy-first architecture

TruJob never reads or stores email content. The extension extracts the signals it needs to score a message, then discards the source. No body text, subject line, or sender content is logged. See the security page for the full technical commitment.

No user-facing tradeoffs

Protection does not require a paid tier. The free product covers the core scam-detection use case. The Pro tier adds capacity and additional features. The detection itself is the same for everyone.

Crisis support, not just prevention

TruJob maintains a free resource page at trujob.io/scammed for anyone who has already been scammed by a fake recruiter or job posting. The page links to law enforcement, regulatory agencies, credit bureaus, immigration support, and the National Human Trafficking Hotline. It is free, requires no signup, and includes no upsell.

Brand assets

For journalists and partners who need logo files, brand colors, or screenshots for editorial use.

Logo

Brand colors

Typography

Headings: Poppins (700, 800). Body: Roboto (400, 500, 700). Both available free on Google Fonts.

Naming conventions

TruJob is one word, capital T, capital J. Never "Tru Job" or "TruJOB."

Boilerplate

For press releases, articles, and other coverage where a short standardized description is helpful.

Story angles

If you are a journalist looking for a fresh angle on the recruitment scam beat, here are some directions TruJob can speak to with primary perspective:

• Solo founder building consumer safety tools during their own job search. What it looks like to build a fraud protection product while parallel-searching for a job, all while caring for a newborn.
• Why anti-fraud tools historically exclude informal workers. The systemic gaps in how consumer protection technology is designed, and what it takes to include workers outside formal employment structures.
• What recruitment scams look like in 2026. Specific patterns, real examples (anonymized), and how AI has changed both the scam side and the defense side.
• Privacy architecture for tools that handle email. Engineering decisions when the product premise requires reading sensitive content but the brand premise requires never storing it.
• The mass layoff aftermath. How job seekers from the late-2025 Big Tech and corporate layoffs are being targeted by scam networks at scale.