A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn on Wednesday. CEO of a crypto startup, $125/hr advisory role, review our product via GitHub repo as the first interview step. The social engineering was top-notch, polished profile with 500+ connections, days of back and forth DMs, the cracks only appeared in hindsight. Friday, I got access to the repo, which felt like a win. With a healthy amount of skepticism, I reviewed the repo with Claude. The codebase looked professional and complete, the README was well structured, and the .json files where malware would normally be hidden came back clean. The payload was buried well enough that Claude and I missed it. Luckily, I decided to enjoy my Friday night and not clone the repo. This is the main reason I want to share my story here: many of us are starting new businesses, and when someone offers you a paid role that seems like the perfect fit, your judgment becomes clouded. I know mine did.Having had more time to think, the inconsistencies started to surface. Lying in bed around midnight on Saturday, the eureka moment happened. This was definitely an elaborate scam. I stayed up all night digging through the repo and gathering evidence to file reports. Here’s what I found: The repo contained a fully operational malware delivery chain: - .vscode/tasks.json configured with runOn: folderOpen — silent code execution the moment you open the folder in VS Code, zero prompt. - .githooks/post-checkout buried under 40 lines of decoy comments, downloading and executing a remote payload from a Vercel server across Mac, Linux, and Windows simultaneously, all output suppressed. - Private key social engineering via the .env.local README instruction, a backup vector in case the malware delivery fails or gets caught  - This is a complex attack chain designed to pass pre-clone inspection. Once you clone it, you’re cooked. I stayed up all night gathering evidence and filing reports: Vercel - both domains, GitHub - account + repo, LinkedIn profile, Basescan wallet flagged, Neynar/Farcaster. Then the big guns: RCMP/CAFC and FBI IC3. But then I started thinking, what tools should I have used to protect myself in this situation?