Job candidate finds a California company falsely listing him as a “Senior Advisor” in its sales materials, using his photo, résumé, and a quote he never gave without permission

Author image for Etai Eshet
Etai Eshet • Editor
Sep 9, 2026 9:45 AM EDT

Some startups treat LinkedIn the way a teenager treats a Pinterest board: anything visible online is available for immediate use, provided nobody asks enough questions. Any questions?

A professional headshot becomes company décor, an old résumé becomes an advisory biography, and a person who attended a few interviews gets promoted into a "Senior Advisor" before anyone has bothered to offer them a job or pay. Why waste time building an actual team when the internet is full of people with faces and career histories just sitting there?

This is startup confidence at its purest. A founder meets someone three times, cannot agree to pay them, and then quietly adds them to the sales deck anyway, because compensation is merely a technical detail and consent is one of those outdated concepts that slows innovation. The next logical move is putting Beyoncé on the investor slide and describing her as "informally aligned with the brand."

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  • A company I interviewed with is listing me as a "Senior Advisor" on its website and sales deck. I have never worked for them.

    Man tensely staring at a laptop screen in disbelief by something his discovered
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    Candidate in disbelief

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • In May I interviewed three times with a small software company for an operations role. I eventually withdrew because we
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  • couldn't agree on compensation. I never signed an employment agreement, consulting agreement, NDA, offer letter, or anything else with them.
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  • Yesterday someone I know in the industry sent me a screenshot and asked when I'd started working there.
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  • The company's website had my full name, my LinkedIn photo and a short bio under "Our Advisory
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  • Team." The bio was clearly built from my resume/LinkedIn and described me as a "Senior Advisor."
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  • Then, once they get caught, comes the familiar defense that the information was public. Yes, and a car parked on the street is also public. That doesn’t mean a stranger can borrow it for a client meeting, put it in a brochure, and argue that the owner should feel honored by the exposure. Publicly viewable is not the same thing as commercially reusable, especially when the whole purpose is to suggest that a real person lends credibility to a business they have never joined.

  • I then Googled my name plus the company and found a PDF sales deck on their own domain. It has my photo again, lists some of my actual previous employers, and
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  • Man wearing glasses resting his hand near his mouth while sitting beside a laptop with a concerned expression. like he is troubled by something he discovered
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    Troubled professional sitting next to his laptop 

    Representative only.

  • says their clients "benefit from the experience of our advisory network." There is also a quote under my picture that I never said.
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  • The invented quote is where this becomes especially ambitious. A fake title is already bad enough, but a fake testimonial is the business equivalent of writing yourself a birthday card from George Clooney and hoping nobody checks the handwriting. 

  • I emailed the founder asking them to remove everything immediately.
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  • He responded that they didn't claim I was an employee, that "advisor" is a broad term, and that my photo and professional
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  • background were already public on LinkedIn. He removed me from the website after that email, but the sales PDF is still accessible
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  • and he has not confirmed whether it was already sent to prospective customers.
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  • Today a stranger emailed me through my actual employer asking if I could introduce him to this company because he had seen me in their materials.
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  • So then sales prospect sees the deck, assumes the advisor network is real, and sends an email through the person’s actual employer asking for an introduction. At that point, the company has moved beyond a sloppy website update and into a very strange form of professional identity cosplay.

  • Can a California company legally use my name/photo in advertising or sales material without permission just because the information was publicly available online?
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  • Does it matter that they're presenting me as affiliated with the company rather than simply mentioning me?
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  • And if I haven't lost money from this yet, do I still have any legal remedy beyond asking them to take it down?
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  • Businesses can make mistakes, certainly. What separates a mistake from a strategy is what happens after someone says, “Remove my name and photo.” Taking down one webpage while leaving the sales deck online is less an apology than sweeping half the broken glass under the sofa and announcing that the room is clean.

  • Practical-Owl-9358 Talk to a CA attorney. What you want to ask them about is " misappropriation of likeness". It's a civil tort.
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  • Neat-Researcher-7067 Ask where to send the advisor invoice and make it jaw dropping....
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  • Trenzalore_4 The made-up quote makes their "we only used public information" argument considerably worse. They didn't merely reproduce a factual employment history.
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  • just here for rgolf Great, your advisory fee is 20k a month
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  • Cobra N13 As an advisor I'd advise everyone not to use the company
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