Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”

There are significantly worst things happening in the industry by much much bigger consultancy names. We, an enterprise, hire complete teams from the consultancy that would pick some of the work in different projects with their own product owner and so on but under our contract.

We seldom see all the people whom we interviewed for the teams, as devs, being present in the meetings that they are all expected to be present (of course it is most often the timezone difference that is the mentioned reason). Or people who join have their camera turned off, so no way to see them.

Code quality that comes, is not on par with the skillset we evaluated during the interviews and I suspect the whole consultancy is doing something similar with presenting top engineers in the interview and then moving them between many teams. Leaving the less skilled engineer to do the work.

I've been remote hiring for years. Remote positions are a magnet for fraud of all types.

If you have the budget, I highly recommend moving your compensation points up and focusing on top engineers in remote locations. It's much easier to vet people who have an established online track record and you can tap references from well-known companies. Unfortunately this way you will miss out on some great candidates that haven't yet established themselves, so you still have to branch out.

For remote work we require video interviews and cameras on during meetings. We'd make an exception if someone really needed accommodations to keep their camera off for some reason, but otherwise it's cameras on. I know some people don't like this, but it improves communication and team cohesion in a noticeable way. It also immediately highlights fraud like this.

Get your security team involved. You should be tracking where remote employees access your VPN and company services. Don't be afraid to ask about discrepancies and changes. If someone has logged in from one IP or region for the first 4 weeks and then suddenly you're seeing new logins from a different city or country, investigate. I don't care if people travel, but we need to firmly understand the security situation.

Watch out for people with frequent excuses for missing meetings, having to turn their camera off, excuses like "my camera isn't working today", and so on. Send everyone known-good webcams and company laptops.

And as always, performance management is key. Managing remote is harder than managing in person, and I say that as someone who manages remote and loves remote teams. You need strong performance management practices in place and clear ways to measure it. People who aren't getting their work done should show up quickly in your system and warrant additional manager investigation.

But if someone shows up in Zoom who isn't the person you hired, lock it down ASAP. Don't let being "nice" get in the way of handling an urgent security situation. Someone you didn't hire who hasn't agreed to your contracts is in your system, and that's a red alert emergency.

Late last year we had a candidate who seemed really promising: she had a CS degree from an Ivy League school and had a few years of work experience using relevant technologies.

She absolutely killed the Byteboard technical assessment, and seemed like a good cultural fit during my initial screen. I advised the technical interviewer that he didn't need to go too deep; I was satisfied with her answers on the technical assessment. Then something odd happened - she completely bombed the interview. The interviewer told me that she couldn't even answer the most basic questions e.g. "what tech stack does your employer use?" I was thoroughly confused about that, but still passed her on to the VPE to help us get to the bottom of the discrepancy. Our VPE confirmed the previous technical interviewer's assessment.

We came to the conclusion that she could not have completed the technical assessment on her own and obviously didn't move forward from there.

Rant: when companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good?

This is just companies getting back the same treatment they've been subjecting their customers to for over a decade.

In business this is called "business process outsourcing", aka send off sensitive data & permissions to sweatshops in third-world countries.

While it's a shame that it happened to what I assume is a legitimate small/medium business that doesn't do the aforementioned practice, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any big company that does the above and suddenly ends up at the receiving end of it.

The market has reacted, and as more and more things go remote it allows the "little guys" to take a stab at it with varying degrees of success.

(to be clear, I do not condone this behavior despite being approached several times to be a "front" for foreign developers - however, I totally understand the market dynamics that push them to do this)

Sadly, a new risk with "100% remote anywhere" culture. Employers need to stop trusting blindly and do more due diligence. People like these are the reason why some employers will never trust remote employees.

I suggest calling the candidate in person for 1 day at a co-working location and meet them in person once you are ready to make an offer. Pay for their time since you have anyway decided to hire them. Yes, this adds cost to you but it will be a huge deterrence for fraud. If a candidate doesn't like it, they can move on.

I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red flags you can watch out for.

- The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the interview ends immediately.

- Another one is, if you do hire a person, they suddenly want to be paid through some unrelated company. ("Oh, it's my brothers company, I do this for tax reasons").

There are other red flags which aren't as certain, but should definitely raise your suspicions:

- The CV has been professionally designed or laid out.

- The most recent job entry is a vague "Remote contractor" or similar which doesn't list specific companies they've worked for.

- The name on the email doesn't match the name on the CV.

- You get a series of emails following up after a few days, as though someone is running a drip email campaign.

- The application email is sent directly to any of your employees, rather than to your standard recruiting email address, almost as though someone has used a sales tool to find internal contacts.

These last 5 points can occur in legitimate applications, but when you see them, it's a sign that additional suspicion is warranted. These fake employees are generally not individuals, but professional operations.

This has been happening for decades. Long before covid, saddle up and due your due dilligence.

Any decently sized company has employment contractual provisions for misrepesentation of facts, expertise, and experience during the hiring process. Use that, hire one of the other candidates you interviewed, and fire them.

The only unfortunate thing here is having to read about this because your team failed in their due dilligence. That's a team/company failure, and this looks more like fluff spin for a narrative than anything else.

Your people didn't do their jobs, and lost costs vetting a potential hire who wasn't a good hire because of it. That's the business you are in. You knew the risks.

Prior to the first interview you should have covered an introduction and some of the expected vetting processes (i.e. Should we choose to extend an offer... there are requirements for an in-person report for HR to check I9 and other forms (i.e. potentially a certification of the facts they submitted as part of the process ...), and the required process of reporting instances of fraud to IC3/FBI). [It is often across state lines].

That's just some examples, I'm sure you can figure it out with your legal team if this is really an issue, because its seriously not that hard. You set up a process that gives bad actors enough rope so that if they cost you money in bad faith, there will be consequences.

I made a comment [1] in a similar thread a month ago. Even thought there were people not happy with some of my words, I'll copy it here verbatim (Mostly because the comments inferred opinions that I was not making):

Some time ago (~6 months) my company was looking to hire a programmer.

We don't have a established process for this as it was some years since we hired a coder, but then we are in the industry (hiring) so published a couple of adverts here and there and we got the thing rolling.

Most of the applicants were seriously under qualified, and my colleagues had to go through a lot of rubbish in the form of CVs in order to find suitable candidates.

But a few of them were good enough to at least make it to the interview step, and off the invitations went.

One of'em candidates - Let's call him "Rajeed" - promptly accepted the meeting, and due to the small amount of people that made it that far - let me remind you, first interview - my colleagues were slightly excited, but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar.

You can imagine my colleagues surprise when they opened the Zoom session and Rajeed was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were two person of whom we knew nothing about - apparently they were running some sort of coding shop - and when my colleagues asked for Rajeed they just said "Oh, it's OK, it's OK. You can talk to us."

For obvious reasons the meeting didn't last long.

We ended up hiring a coder from Poland that, even thought he was decent, was miles ahead of the rest of the candidates.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669193

I've posted a bit of a rant below but I figured I'd make another comment with actual tips to prevent this.

First off, a lot of comments indeed recommend insisting on a functioning webcam. This might be uncomfortable for some (and shouldn't be a mandatory, long-term "webcam mandatory" policy), but explaining the reasons behind it should make the vast majority of people be fine with it at the start. Long-term, a culture where people feel comfortable having their cameras on regularly is also good so people turn it on voluntarily, even beyond deterring fraud (personally I prefer seeing someone's face rather than a profile picture).

Second, this kind of behavior is only going to get more common; there's no way to deter it in advance. The best you can do is optimize your hiring pipeline for faster turnarounds so you can quickly react when you detect such behavior and it doesn't cost you as much. Maybe an initial, short "contract to hire" system is better, as it allows you to delay all the employment-related formalities (which are slow and costly) to after you've already confirmed the candidate isn't a fraudster.

Finally, the reason people do this kind of fraud is because they won't get in if they stay honest. If you actually need development services, does it actually have to be an employee? Maybe you can just be open to contractors or outsourcing agencies, let them in "honestly" with appropriate contract terms that protect both sides, and then it reduces the incentive for the "fake" employees to lie to you if they can get in legitimately.

Last year, I was asked to interview a man who was procured through a remote-staffing firm.

He was based in Southeast Asia, and on his resume it looked like he met all of the competencies we needed -- including English proficiency.

But on the call, I noticed that whenever I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question, then turn his video back on.

It turned out that the man was using a translator and really didn't speak any English whatsoever.

I have no idea how he expected to be able to do the job if he had been hired, but I guess he thought it was worth a shot.

In talking with the remote staffing firm, they were extremely apologetic. He had apparently pulled the same trick with them, but they didn't do video interviews, so it was harder to pick up on.

I dealt with a number of people who weren't who they said they were in my last bout of hiring.

There's typical ones where an engineer will stack their resume with buzzwords that they don't understand at a basic level. An example of this is putting Kubernetes on ones resume but not being able to explain the different workloads. People don't often call this fraud, but I do when it crosses some magical threshold. The reason I call it fraud is that fraud, to me, generally implies intent to deceive. About a year ago I discovered on Reddit there were people coaching others through lying on their resumes and in interviews with the reasoning that "everyone does it" and "you'll learn on the job".

The second kind I've encountered is more analogous to what you experienced, though we never hired any of these folks. Retrospectively I think one of the things that helped us avoid hiring these folks is that we don't refer to an engineers provenance. Early on I took the stance that just because you say you're from Google, or any other large engineering firm, doesn't mean you're the right fit for the team. We had candidates invest in a 2-3 hour take home exercise that was pretty easy, it mostly tested your API design skills but because it involved code we got some good peeks into what that would look like in a contrived scenario. Second, we ask that candidates bring an example of projects they've worked on, starting with ones they led. This one is a little harder to fake the funk on, especially if the candidate is Senior+.

We've seen a significant upswing in this over the last 18-24 months. It has gotten to the point where I can identify the fraudulent resumes as many of them seem to be cooked up from the same template. I wrote a quick script to identify these pretty quickly (assuming the PDF resume they submit has parseable text spans in them).

A lesser form of fraud, but still insidious at this point, are the templated resumes that misrepresent work experience. They will list a top line item in "work history" of something that sounds like tech startup, but in actuality isn't a company at all. It's just an open source project, that no one actually uses, with a website. Apart from the items listed, the candidates never have any legitimate work experience. It smells like a way to get resumes past any ATS keyword filtering and/or less-experienced recruiters.

And usually, the candidate hasn't really written much code at all in the repo. Just a smattering of readme updates, config changes, and maybe some bug fixes amounting to less than ~100-200 SLOC over the span of months.

In 100% of these cases we've seen so far, the resumes look exactly the same, including formatting/layout/etc. The projects all exist under the "OSLabs Beta" github orb [1] and the resume also lists a tech talk they did under the "SingleSprout Speaker Series" moniker. Most often, there is no actual evidence of them doing this talk, but in many cases you can find someone else doing the same talk topic on youtube if you search.

SingleSprout is a recruiting organization, so it seems at least somewhat likely that they are the ones shepherding this process, though I have no evidence of that. It could just be that they partner with this OS Labs entity as part of their candidate funnel. Whatever the case may be, this is at best (if I'm being charitable) a gross misrepresentation of candidate experience.

N.B. I am 100% OK with hiring folks based on (F)OSS experience. An active github is actually something I select for and, if its available, I will spend significant time reviewing such that I can have a meaningful discussion with the candidate about their work. These candidates are different entirely (for hopefully obvious reasons).

[1] https://github.com/oslabs-beta

EDIT: Wanted to add some clarification here that this post is about the candidates involved, on the topic of hiring woes that OP brought up, but not about the specific entities I mentioned. It may just be incidental that all of the resumes we've seen have had the aforementioned patterns. It is not my intent to malign any of the orgs I referenced.

There was a thread on this topic about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694

I had the same thing happen ~9 years ago. Interviewed a candidate who was fantastic, knew his stuff, and had a solid resume. We made him an offer that day and he started the next week.

The guy that showed up (in person!) for the job was definitely not him, and asked rudimentary questions ("how do I access the terminal", "what programming languages should I download", "how do I install git", etc). We gave him the day in case it was just a bad morning or something, but ended up firing him the next day for misrepresenting 'his' experience.

Happened with my partner, and have heard of this from a lot of friends. This is a real issue. It hurts 'real' candidates and everyone that takes time to be apart of the hiring process.

HR dept's are simply unable/ill-equipped to handle this new reality. Honestly, at larger org's this is really an upper management issue first and foremost, as HR dept's are sort of benefiting from these frauds. ( Before you go off on that last sentence, I did say 'sort of' - and I personally believe in 'you get what you incentivize'...so)

We did one interview with a candidate who had a great looking resume and was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to live in. Started off with some general get to know you talk and asked him about where he was from... crickets. Then went into his experience and it 100% did not line up with what was on his resume. I started asking questions about the jobs on his resume and he hung up.

My PM, who was also on the call, had looked up the name on the resume and found the linked in of guy whose resume had been stolen. We notified him that someone was using his resume and actually ended up interviewing him! We came close to hiring him but his salary ask was out of our price range.

I’ve been the dev that replaced the strong candidate.

It was even worse, I was simply the guy in the meetings, the actual work was done by another dev that I translated for.

The best way to prevent it on remote teams is having the actual team in the interviews.

I managed up to 3 other devs while having a full time job on my end. Managing 3 daily meetings is no easy task.

The missions where short and we got fired only once, but that’s because the dev who was supposed to do the work was not up to the task.

Absolutely! I made a comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 just recently about this. My company hired a guy who passed their tests, yet the guy who joined us for work was barely able to move a mouse around the screen, let alone get stuck in as a "Senior DevOps Engineer".

After we finally fired him I did a little digging. His resume was very similar to 100's of others found across linkedin, a list of devops keywords basically. Almost all of the people he had "worked" with in a previous company had the same text and even looked very similar.

I'm pretty sure that the company gets these people in the door and they try to last as long as possible earning western senior dev salaries. Rince and repeat a few times a year and it probably earns them a decent amount.

I don't do a lot of interviewing at my company, but I encountered my first fraud candidate two weeks ago. He said he was having connectivity issues and asked about not joining video. I offered to work with HR to reschedule but he said he didn't want to inconvenience anyone. If it was purely my decision, I would say no video = no interview, but I guess fraudsters thrive when administrative coordination breaks down.

He gave a technically sound answer to every question, but I was extremely skeptical. For one thing, he wholeheartedly agreed to the design outlined in my "honeypot" question where the solution would be something prone to triggering immense technical debt. He also dismissed the "soft" question about a time he encountered a challenge.

His most recent work experience was at a competitor where a former colleague works (we're in a niche space). That friend told me he encountered the same thing, including a candidate who recently claimed to work at my company and was moving (I never heard of the name nor could find mention in Slack/AD).

I am glad that a lot of people in this thread have figured out the fraud and caught the rogue employee early on. But the reason this fraud is so prevalent is because it works.

I have a friend who had someone else go through the interview process for him and ended up getting hired at one of the top 10 largest banks in US. Not only that, but because he was grossly under qualified for this job, he hired someone to teach him how to do his job. He works his normal 8-5, then he screen shares with this guy and they work together to complete his tasks. I'm a bit surprised that this worked and that they still haven't caught on, he has been working there for 8-10 months now. He has been sharing company intellectual property of a top US bank to foreigners for 8-10 months. The saddest part about this is that, he isn't a dumb, he is knowledgeable enough to get a decent job without cheating. In fact he has worked, both legally and ethically, for reputable companies.

I'm just flabbergasted at how this can happen, or how someone thinks they can get away with it.

Our company is pretty much entirely remote, but the interview process includes an initial screen (on video, about 45 mins), and then about 4 hours of interviews, again all on video, with about 8 different people. Point being, we know who you are. Do people think humans can't recognize faces or voices? Do some companies interview without a face-to-face conversation? I honestly just don't understand how this works, or how someone could think this could work.

We had pretty much the exact same thing happen earlier this year. Our team is remote. The guy I interviewed with on of our team members was an excellent hire. The guy that showed up online the first day was having all sorts of connectivity issues. And his communication was completely different.

We got suspicious pretty quick and eventually forced the guy we hired into a call and confronted him about it. His excuse was that it was his roommate online because he had some unexpected errand or something that morning.

The candidate didn't even come to us from one of the big faceless recruiters, but from one we've worked with in the past who's provided several of our current team members.

It's the first instance of that happening since we've gone remote, so I foresee us doing some more verification day 1, etc. for future hires.

And a few years ago, after we were acquired by a large enterprise company, we had several instances of the big contracting firms sending us different people than who we interviewed, or even catching the interviewee being a stand-in for someone else on their computer doing the work, etc. And this was prior to us being remote, so we'd get completely different people showing up in our office back then, etc. Our process at that time was to basically reinterview as soon as they stepped through the door, and then usually walk them right back out. Eventually, we were able work around having to hire from those firms.

This is almost ‘mainstream’ news at this point - it was discussed in a recent This American Life episode: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/770/my-lying-eyes

One of my favorite failed interviews was a candidate who wore glasses and took his interview in a dimly lit room. This allowed me to see the google search box from his monitor reflecting on his glasses lol. And sure enough, every question was followed by typing, screen flashing on his glasses, 20 seconds of silence, and a really poor response.

You're getting the person's photo ID for their I-9, and it's simple enough to verify employment history before making an offer. Just ask for a photo ID during the interview process as well. I mean they could still have a fake ID but that would be a much more elaborate and much more serious fraud.

Really though, for all prospective hires it's a leap of faith to assume performance in the interview will translate into performance in the actual job, and you need to be prepared for that not to be the case. Whatever safeguards you have in place to protect you from someone who isn't as good as they seemed to be should presumably also protect you from someone who isn't who they seemed to be.

I have not experienced this personally, but someone I met told me they have encountered (or maybe also heard of) candidates who were lip-synching someone else's voice to answer questions during an interview. Basically, this person was warning that we should pay attention to a candidate's lips to make sure that they are the person who is actually speaking because there may be someone out of sight of the camera who may be providing competent answers. It doesn't surprise me because a lot of these remote or tech jobs are in high demand; but I don't understand what the cheater who actually gets hired would actually do. Part of me thinks they may actually be hackers or foreign agents.

The company owner hired via upwork a dev for about 2x my salary and he produced little work but he billed 80 hours/week, turn out he recorded a work day session and used like a mouse recording/replaying app, each day he will just start the program and it will reproduce the same result, was really fun trying to figure out what's going on, and a strange way to get a raise

Just once, I interviewed this guy with a clearly european name. On the call he had no camera on, a very thick chinese accent and barely spoke English. In our email comms he was fluent.

There was no way for me to verify this guy was real, he couldn't give me his address because of "tax reasons" and wanted me to use his "wife's address" for his W-2 and legal paperwork.

Just all around fishy. After a bit he just stopped responding in the call, hung up and never responded to emails again.

---

Unrelated, I've had many chinese nationals reach out to purchase my freelancing profile so I guess this is a common scam.

I have never experienced it and I don't think it's a thing in my corner of the world.

However there was a post here or on Reddit (the line is blurry sometimes) where some developers from a specific Asian country described several cases. They made it sound like a frequent, organized thing, like a consultancy or some kind of racket. Most of them cited desperation and a "fake it until you make it" culture as the reasons for lying.

In my opinion this is bound to happen at places where people are poor and unhappy. And it's not limited to the software industry.

Honesty is in shorter supply than you think in the consulting industry (with good exceptions). I have been around long enough to see fabricated resumes, bait-and-switch of candidates, and dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated.

What surprises me the most is that you have managers that not only end up getting in business with them but they are not able to find what it is really going on. And in some big companies some managers know what is going on and are fine with it!

Here is a tip: just inform the interviewee that because of "hiring fraud", the whole interview video will be recorded. Such frauds won't accept your job offer, even if they clear interviews.

We've seen a form of this a lot recently too. Some patterns we've noticed, at least for those coming to us:

- Name / ethnicity / accent don't add up. By itself these weren't necessarily direct red flags, but combined with others it's been a common pattern.

- A lot of background noise of others talking. Can't really make out what the others are saying but sounds like a bunch of other people interviewing.

- Long pauses before answering questions, and often times the "candidate" looking somewhere off camera.

- Very short direct answers. When they do answer, it's very short and direct with no further elaboration. Any follow ups, even simple ones are follow but long pauses as well.

I think contractors taking on 2 or more full time roles at once is rife at the moment in the UK. In 2021 I put together a team of 7 contractors, and I’m as sure as I can be there 3 of them were double billing. Incredible!

The scale of this on the thread is astonishing. I hired in the past through marketplaces. One particular candidate started strong but then his productivity began to taper off. Camera off in more and more meetings. Less availability. And this was a full time position! I haven't been able to prove it, but a very similar profile photo showed on LinkedIn as working full time for a different company. Whether or not he was working 2 jobs, more, or even being a face of a dev shop, all are possibilities. All I know is this individual was not just working full time for us.

Yep had the same experience multiple times in tech industry especially when hiring via contracting companies.

I asked around and while what you encountered is one way they cheat, there are many ways the do it. I collected all possible ways candidates cheat and redflags to look out for when interviewing candidates in my blog post.

(here is post link) https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/how-to-catch-a-cheati...

* if this falls under self-promotion, I can remove it.

Someone actually attempted to hire me to play a part in a scam like this over LinkedIn about a month ago. The guy who contacted me says their devs don't know web tech well and don't speak English very well, so he wanted me to do the interviews for them over phone calls and offered a modest rate for the service I'd provide.

I ended the conversation as soon as the plan was revealed, and was struck by just how brazen the dude was just blatantly asking me to lie for them professionally after exchanging like 2 messages.

While remote work has made it easier and more prevalent, "hiring fraud" has been around forever. Especially in larger corporations, where interviewing was done by loosely associated teams, and the faces of all the in-person candidates blended together or were rapidly forgotten. I personally witnessed this 3 or 4 times back in the 90's, while an employee of a Fortune 5 company.

Contracting agencies were the worst with the bait-and-switch game though, even prior to H-1Bs.

I've been on the hiring process for rather big company and all kind of frauds happened on daily basis.

Faux identities, sub-hiring for work, outsourcing to low cost countries, even stuff like hiring actors for interviews and intimidation tactics (sic) plus a lot lot more.

Hiring (especially remotely) is a game and at some level you need to incorporate some anti-fraud techniques.

I feel exactly zero sympathy for companies at this point. Y'all have spent years suppressing wages, making candidates jump through all kinds of hoops, and encourage a "fake it 'til you make it" culture among founders.

Now someone pulls some dirty, saucy tricks on you and you're crying about? Cry me a fucking river. Boo hoo.

Yes I did. They wanted my stuff to be sent. When I said "no", I just show it on-screen they lost all interest suddenly and finished the call after encouraging to do the exercise and "take the time I need" (bc I was working already in my day job).

But this was more employer-fraud, not employee.

Not this way, but a few years ago we got an entire team of 5 people with a very specific skillset for a project and after the first week I discovered they have no such skills. Higher management in my company did not believe, but a month later they started to realize something is wrong, so they talked to the higher management from that other company with no good result. It took a bit over 1 year to terminate that contract.

Also about hiring fraud, I saw many positions that were advertised, interviews were performed, the "right" person was hired - all the interviews were fake, the positions were arranged for certain people from the very beginning. It is quite common in some companies and positions in my country, including international companies with local branches.

I worked for a consulting (bodyshop) almost 10 years ago and they had this happen. Someone did phone interviews with flying colours. The candidate himself was barely functional with English and had a pocket translator in hand at all times. He was let go within a couple months.

We're focusing mostly on new hires, but since work-from-home went mainstream, I've observed some existing and trusted employees suddenly always off camera during zoom meetings, with a different voice. Often along with a dip in the quality of their work.

I have had experiences where you do video interviews. When interviewing the audio is off and what is happening is the person answering is on speaker phone and the guy you are looking at is pretending to talk.

The simplest way to discover is ask the color of your shirt.

While I have some empathy, and I am not certain what was involved in your technical interview but the level of difficulty in some cases is just plain nuts. My first tech interview in January was mind boggling, timed questions of 90 seconds. The position was for Django, and not a single question was Django. All pure Python. The main question was so abstract to this day I have no idea wtf they wanted, 12 minutes to solve. Twitter and other places are filled with cases like this. So in an environment like this expect pinch hitters.

On a more positive note my last interview was very fair and on topic.

There’s also this, which is a slightly different kind of fraud made possible by remote work: https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed

Yes. People knocking on our doors thinking they were hired and come to start their first day of work.

What happened was the fraudsters asked the candidates to buy some hardware on their own claiming we will reimburse them. Then they said they are sending them money to reimburse them but they made a mistake and sent too much and asked to send back the difference.

Another variant was they asked them to buy computers and then send to fraudster's address ostensibly for software installation.

We tweaked our website so that candidates browsing our website learn we never do such things, we explained the hiring process and especially the communication.

Years ago I worked at a company where one of the first paragraphs in the contract was that you have to pay a 4 digit sum if you didn't show up on the first day. (The company was small with solid funding but had actually a massive churn)

OTOH I experienced the reverse. Shady offers where red flags kept popping up after accepting the 1st interview round. E.g. the (ext.) recruiter lying about the funding or the company revealing shortly before signing the contract that the runway is just half a year. Not surprising that some applicants aren't 100% truthful either...

Something like that happened with a team at my previous employer. The person nailed the interview, but when the person started they seemed pretty clueless about the position, the programming languages, and the tools that the team used. Plus the person's personality seemed a little different. The company quickly figured out that a front did the interview of this person, and that they were hired under false pretenses. Immediate dismissal.

This sort of situation seems to have become very common in the last couple or three years.

Earlier this year I was part of technical screening interviews but in two interviews we noticed the interviewee being given the answers during the call. They would wear airpods but have their teams device set to the laptop speaker / mic. Someone on our side heard the second voice coming from the airpods and we killed the interview.

We can try to detect / avoid it in the future but ultimately my takeaway is to avoid generic question lists for remote technical interviews, and instead try to hammer into one of their projects.

We recently had to deal with a case of this at my company. The story is almost exactly the same, guy sounded great, passed all the interviews, had a killer resume etc. When he actually got to work, it was clear that he barely knew how to use a computer let alone program one. He had trouble searching for string of text in an open buffer, or explaining simple code in a language that his resume claimed he had expertise. It's very unfortunate and ultimately just wasted everyone's time.

Worst we ever had was a very promising interviewee whom could not elaborate on any of the things on his resume. When asked about specific technologies listed on his resume, he was unable to speak on any of his experiences.

Finally, out of frustration I just ask him straight out "why did you put these things on your resume if you don't have experience in them?" to which he said "the recruiter told me to".

As far as I'm aware, we never worked with that recruiter again.

> I'm just curious to hear how many of you have experienced something similar. Is it common? Is there something obvious I'm not thinking of to help avoid these situations?

Had the exact same thing happen, yeah. One person interviewed on camera and used their ID for employment verification (EVerify/I-9). Someone else was joining meetings instead, initially with their camera off, and then when confronted and turned camera on, was DEFINITELY not the same person.

This should address the worries about how remote work will offshore all job.

Because, think about it a minute:

Why should the top-talent overseas slaver away for your startup for low compensation?

Taking India as an example: There are top companies in India which would give top talent a competitive salary for India, along with corresponding status and responsibility.

So, why should top talent there take your similarly paid remote job which lacks the social standing and credibility that comes by working for a top-tier Indian company? Even if you pay higher than the local top-tier company, the difference in pay should be high enough to offset all other things that the candidate is losing by not taking a job in a respectable local company. This kind of social status is quite important because of social pressure from parents, family peers in many cultures. Not unlike how top-tier candidates still prefer to work for reputable companies in San Francisco instead of going for somewhat higher pay in no-name startups.

To recruit and keep top tier talent overseas, you will have to treat them just like how you were treating your local candidates. If you try to weasel your way out of it through scammy business practices - underpay, overwork, sweatshops etc - you will reap what you sow - scammy candidates.

Been there. This happened about 3 years ago, it was also horribly blatant. We interviewed a candidate who blew us away, superior candidate, easy "yes" from everyone. then when he started, it became pretty clear within 2-ish weeks this was not the same person. He could not do basic BASIC tasks. The ironic part was, we did a video call, but none of us could remember what the original guy looked like, and we did not record the video.

The safest course of action is keeping 100% remote but interviewing in-person at least once.

I've had this occur in a number of ways, typically with candidates who are not US Based. One candidate was clearly the "face" of a group of more skilled programmers. Several others were not the person who was listed in a resume.

Luckily enough, asking them to program while on camera makes it easy to suss out people who are not what they seem.

And if they do not have their webcam on during the interview loop, it is an automatic no-hire.

Interestingly, we’ve had a bunch of fraud where people impersonate OSS devs. They then proxy their docs, and try to run fake traffic for ad revenue.

More info in our blog post: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers...

I have been on the other end of this. I received an email offer to attend these hiring interviews and meet with customers while not doing the actual dev work.

Too sleazy for me. I'm basically selling my brand to another company. If companies get smart and create an employee blacklist, it becomes a lot harder for me to be employed down the line. (Hrm, maybe I should start a blacklist.)

One of our managers told a story about someone using Deepfake during video interviews; it looked weird and artifacty but the quality was shit anyway so they just attributed it to that.

Honestly don't know if it's true or just a story but now we only hire remote in the US and after the initial screens we fly out candidates for in-person (pay for the flight and -if needed- hotel).

Yes, experienced the exact same situation in 2020. Person starting day 1 was different than person interviewed. They weren't too smart about it either - a little online sleuthing showed how the two people were related. We confronted him about it and fired him the first week. We also notified the feds about it (person had been submitted for clearance so we had to).

More meta:

I wonder if there's an opportunity in the future to tie work identity and work payments to a crypto wallet - i.e. "Your Github is tied to the wallet address, you apply to the job with the wallet address, you log into work accounts with the wallet address, and we pay you at the wallet address." Almost like the next evolution of Yubikeys.

I've heard of this happening. A friend of mine recently hired a candidate, but the candidate that actually "showed up" (it was a remote company) was completely different. It took his company 3 months to realize they had been duped by a scam out of India.

How did you due diligence the candidate? Background check? Docs to confirm they are US based?

Same thing happened at a previous company I worked at about one year into the pandemic.

We still gave the guy until the end of the week to prove he could be useful.

He wasn't, so we let him go, but we would have kept him on if he was competent. Despite the fraud. Because it was such a pain to find a good dev at that time (not easy now, but not as hard, subjectively)

This would be impossible for us because despite hiring remote people from all over the UK we take photo ID and various other forms of identification as proof they can legally live and work in the UK.

I get how this would be a thing when you're hiring from other territories. Got to step up the checks and balances in that scenario.

Universities in the USA make proper use of third party checks, while me in poor EU had a postdoc that I suspected was faking something. The thing became big once he could not board a plane due to differences in company Identity (as in company-bought ticket) vs name in passport. I prefer to leave it here.

Not directly, but yes. We must hire someone in India, and we were making interviews through Xoom. HR strongly advises asking the candidate to switch the camera on and take a picture of him, just because it's very common that someone is replaced by someone else during technical interviews.

We had a guy that before COVID interview remotely as iOS engineering contract. When we came on the job was not good. Our boss heard him on the phone talking in his native language asking saying something like "you need to help me here, I do not know how to do it."

He was on the job only one day.

I have been personally emailed to participate in an interview under another candidates name. It set off so many alarms for me. I did not respond.

Here’s what I was sent.

> Hope you're doing well.

> We're a tightly-knit team of full-stack developers and we need someone who can help us with client communications. Most of our developers are not native English speakers and we often face communication issues. That's why we need someone who's based in the U.S and has technical background.

> The main responsibility will be taking job interviews on our behalf. You should be able to join the meetings under someone else's name.

> This is an hourly engagement and the rate is $40 ~ $80 / hr depending on your experience.

> Please kindly reply to this email if you're interested.

If you're planning on sending them a multi-thousand dollar work computer, why not invest in a plane ticket and overnight hotel just to be able to have a conversation with them in person before giving them an offer?

You would save so much hassle with a (relatively) small investment.

Today I spoke with one of ex-colleages. He said he was spending hours to weed out candidates that joined his company through fraudulent means. There are scams at multiple layers: during hiring, proxying in day to day work. It became a huge industry in its own.

I thought you were gonna talk about a company bringing you in for an interview but turned out they weren't hiring, just seeing who was out there in case they did need people. Meanwhile, I wasted my lunch hour doing what I thought was interviewing.

The top story on HN right now would seem to indicate that it's not just you/your team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

I interviewed a candidate whose lip movements were not matching the sounds. His mouth just mumbled randomly, but a quite eloquent voice was produced, including sounds like "th". I assumed that it was some sort of sound delay and placed the doubts on myself ("it's probably my uncouncious bias"). When he got hired, he happened to be placed in the same team as me, and I was surprised to how thick his accent was. He just stayed for less than one week, because he lied about a lot of stuff to HR as well (he wasn't even living in the country that he said he was, so there was no way to ship the equipment).

I was offered a job at a major defense contractor in Binghamton NY without any interview. I had seen their job postings for this location for years and was mostly curious about the work they were doing. I finally got a response from some recruiters in NJ but they were evasive about any interview claiming the hiring manager was too busy, had some weird housing offer, and had an obnoxious superiority complex.

This was immediately suspicious and I hate slimeball recruiters so I made them arrange an interview and ghosted them. One of the recruiters called to chew me out while I was returning home from a successful interview for a real job.

Curious - what did/will you guys do? Fire him day 1? Are there any repercussions to this...ie do you have to pay him for time worked on day 1? I read it's common, but how in the world do you handle something like this?

Yep. I am a junior engineer. I got a message on Linkedin, someone was offering me like $2k/week to take interviews/technical assessments for clients overseas. I asked if it was legal and he stopped messaging me.

Yep. Some startup guy in the chat widget space basically used me as free consulting under the premise of hiring for a job. The joke's on him because I'm at one of the MAANG's now as an SRE equivalent.

Reading through all the responses...My personal take on what I've been reading.

The amount of cheating that I ( and my fellow professors ) have seen during these past few years has absolutely exploded (in a way that is beyond belief, and I've been doing this for a while).

The techniques others have outlined/alluded to ( camera off, a big life event just happened, looking off camera, noise, etc ) are all things that I've been seeing. And whilst this is nothing to be lauded, after all how many vectors are there, I do think that perhaps a solution is looking towards academics. (just saying...)

Someone just posted a story on "being impersonated" :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

Many years ago I worked at a startup where the CEO was a former CS professor. While at the university, he worked with a somewhat legendary guy who ran the CS school's IT infra. Somehow wires got crossed in recruiting while sourcing the candidate, and another guy with _the exact same name_ who _also worked at the university in IT_ but for a different school got hired after what must've been a perfunctory interview.

The startup had a lot of other problems, that one was the most awkward. It folded not very long afterwards.

So what happened next? Did you fire him or is he still working for you?

I have seen belligerent aging managers use a news item about this criminal action to bolster their own "these people" management theories, on the other hand.

plenty of mob types are making mob money on this scam while we type, as excellent young engineers struggle to make $3k USD per month.. I will guess. Overall seems like collateral damage for the relentless wage-war with outsourcing.. from the engineer side, I tend towards "this is the (outsourced workforce) bed you made now you are getting it back"

Just vaguely related, but it seems that various forms of hiring fraud are now appearing, i.e. https://connortumbleson.com/2022/09/19/someone-is-pretending...

In the remote world, it's going to be difficult to address, but it's happened also in the old physical world — albeit less frequently.

When I was freelancing (even before the pandemic and remote taking off), I used to get constant outreaches from people in Asia asking if I could secure contracts, do the meetings and face to face, and let them do the coding. They'd keep 80% and I'd keep 20% for a couple hours of work. I always flipped it on them and said since it's my reputation, I'll keep the 80%. None of them took me up on it. It seems like they've moved on to a new system of fraud.

Yes this happened in my company recently. We took video screenshots and compared faces and fired a few people. But a lot of people were hired before they knew this was going on.

Deja Vu? This exact question and set of circumstances was Asked previously.

Ahh, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343

Which referenced: https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-...

You didn't hire the guy for his identity. You hired him to do work. See how his performance is. If it's not the level of performance you were expecting, fire him.

Where can I purchase this service? I'm a very capable engineer but my time and stress are limited, I'd pay like $20k to avoid having to do interviews

How do the scammers benefit from this? Do they pay people to do well in technical interviews to get the job, then "outsource" the day-to-day job to someone else who is not as technically skilled and/or may not meet the citizenship requirements, then take a cut of the salary in the process?

We had it happen once several years ago when hiring a consultant as a developer through a staffing agency. The candidate passed a webcam interview but then on his start date a different person showed up in our office. It took us a few hours for us to figure out what happened and send him away. Maybe in a larger company no one would have even noticed?

Wow... honestly I'm just amazed at the audacity considering the hoops I've had to jump though. Doesn't' seem at all worth it. I guess they're just banking on it being too much of a hassle to do anything about it but if that happened to me I would clear my day to get to the bottom of it and put an end to it, lol.

At my company, we require camera's on, we meet up 4-5 times a year, I can't see this ever happening at my company but definitely have worked at places that don't collaborate enough or take the time to learn your fellow coworkers. If someone gets away with this you have to question how much synergy your team has IMHO

Our company had this happen, first day the new employee was clearly not who was interviewed and didn't have the skillset. We fired her her 2 hours into the job and thankfully before we did much onboarding.

I'm unclear on what the desired outcome is. A shitty company that can't evaluate on-going employees and let them slide for 30-60 days?

>> A few weeks later on his first day the guy in the Zoom was definitely not the guy I interviewed.

What do you mean by this? Like the face is another person? can you go into more detail about "not the guy I interviewed"? maybe it's just that zooming/remote work inherently requires more trust.

Thankfully, I work remote and with near-zero chance of fraud.

I had to get my "badge" 1h away. Had to be sponsored, multiple forms of ID, and an active paperwork on file. Full handprints were taken for both hands. Pictures as well.

Basically if I tried even KIND OF, I'd be going to federal prison. No ifs, ands, or buts.

It became an industry in its own. There are different layers of fraud from hiring to proxying day to day work. I know couple of guys who have been proxying for more than 5 people. This will become societal problem soon as this is going at a huge scale.

This sounds related to the other HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

In that case, someone pretended to be Connor Tumbleson to get hired.

Many years ago (1980 I believe) I heard the following rumor about a company I was doing some contract work for: they submitted two full time time cards for many of their consultants, one to a government customer, one to a private sector customer.

You know, it had occurred to me that you could do this with some companies interview styles. If they're just picking random people you aren't going to work with to evaluate you, and the company is large enough.

If as part of the hiring process, something old school and simple as calling just a referenced ex-teammate (or two) of the candidate and tell you things about him/her wouldn't massively remove this risk?

I wonder if companies would be willing to pay for a service that vets remote candidates in person in their city? Effectively the service would hire locals to meet/interview the candidate in person.

Maybe someone read too much Tim Ferris! Never experienced it but never worked remote first. Agree that you need to call it out. With AI advances though this is going to get harder to detect!

Please check in from time to time to let us know how this "remote only" endeavor is working out for you. I know it worked good for 37signals, just wondering if it can be duplicated.

Nobody that made it to the offer stage, but we've had candidates make it through the recruiter screen using a stand-in, then fall on their face in a real interview.

I have first hand experience interviewing developers via Zoom who are trying to mime the audio from a speakerphone on their end with someone answering questions.

On the flipside, I've applied for plenty of jobs- only to be told I lack necessary skills for the positions.

My resume has been edited to fit each job.

On the other hand, we once hired a remote guy at a company I worked for. There was no identity fraud.

He just didn't do any work. Got fired ofc.

Is that better?

Has anyone considered opening a criminal case against such people? Evidence of fraud shouldn't be too hard to collect.

I’ve once had a remote coworker who had two full time jobs at the same time.

They would reuse code with both companies.

That was a freaking mess.

When candidates tell me they’re in the US but our conversation has a 3 second lag, that’s usually a red flag.

You thought that going 100% remote wouldn't have any drawbacks... You apparently thought wrong LOL

Nope. Pretty niche field that has small world vibes and such a person would get flushed out pretty fast

I recently saw a video where someone is lip syncing answers to recruiter questions over a zoom call

Is he an Indian? This is well known

I have not but I have heard first hand of people interviewing remotely from India (from big staffing firms of course) that were great for the job and then on the first day (pre covid) they physically showup it is a completely different person. They assume that westerners will not be able to tell the two apart and apparently it is pretty damn obvious.

TLDR: Giant staffing firms suck for everyone

Scary. I can't believe someone would have the nerve to do this. Fire fast.

Yes, I've had this happen at a place I had worked for.

Do you have legal right to claim their compensation?

What was the national background of the candidate?

I’ve seen it at 2 different companies so far.

Constantly.

No ID check and he was given a job? Does this happen to anyone here?

For remote companies, would you consider outsourcing if there were an outsourcing agency that were easy-to-use, fast, cheap, reliable and high-quality? (Assume for the sake of outsourcing that there were an outsourcing agency that didn't suck and wasn't sleazy.)

If so, I'd like to talk to you and do some customer-validation interviews. Please find my email in my profile.

The benefits would be that instead of having fixed-staff that is sometimes poorly allocated, you could spin up inexpensive reliable staff on demand and it would be easily managed through a clean messaging/chat interface---Slack, Whatsapp, Twitter DM, your choice---with your external chief-of-staff. It also greatly increase the bus factor of your company. It would avoid hiring fraud and focus on matching high-quality inexpensive candidates to appropriate projects, and do project management for you.

If every function of your company (marketing down to content writing, development of every single company, all design etc.) is completely fancy and bespoke or you don't want to decrease your bus factor because you are moving way to damn fast to have any process or knowledge sharing outside of key team members, I guess this offer isn't for you. But perhaps also you've haven't completely bought into a sexiness/coolness mythology, realizing this mentality that everything must be in-house that isn't a great fit for 99% of companies. Perhaps you are open to modular boring solutions for certain company functions that aren't actually part of your core values / differentiators / skill area.