Max Lesser
A firm calling itself Foresight and Strategy Consulting Ltd. posted an ad on May 15 looking for a remote analyst with “a minimum of 3 years of professional experience in policy research, preferably within international organizations [or] government agencies.”1 The firm and the job are bogus. They are likely part of a Chinese intelligence operation looking to recruit new assets.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) uncovered the operation while investigating a similar group of fake consulting firms we dubbed the Smiao Network.2 While the websites in the Smiao Network were registered in 2024, the sites in this newly detected network — which we call the Foresight Network — date back to 2021, indicating the operation has persisted for more than three years. There are multiple known cases of Chinese intelligence conducting virtual espionage campaigns.3 Often, these involve nonexistent companies that post job listings both on their own websites as well as on external recruiting sites and online platforms such as Craigslist.
The Foresight Network may have capitalized on the global shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the recent wave of federal layoffs and forced retirements created a fresh pool of targets, the years-old operation quickly posted new listings on Craigslist.4 While there is no way for FDD to discern from the posts themselves if the operation has been successful, the fact that it remains active indicates there has likely been some return on the investment made in running it.
Publicly available records of online activity demonstrate that the three main websites in the network share key infrastructure, including a dedicated email server. All three were registered in China in a 90-day period beginning in December 2021. The sites were built with the same design tools and use nearly identical language. One of the three main sites claims to represent a Taiwanese firm. The inauthentic nature of these websites is not difficult to spot. One of the firms has a supposed CEO named “John Doe.” There are no entries for these firms in major Asian corporate directories. And the language on these sites is stilted and full of grammatical mistakes.
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