Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions

AI generated recruits are a fiction. That&#x27;s not to say there aren&#x27;t fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense.<p>Some background. I&#x27;m a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit&#x27;s. So they typically don&#x27;t the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I&#x27;ve seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they&#x27;re reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.<p>A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia&#x2F;Ukraine. The best candidates I&#x27;ve fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.<p>So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.<p>If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.

&gt; <i>When voice authentication startup Pindrop Security posted a recent job opening, one candidate stood out from hundreds of others.</i><p>&gt; <i>The applicant, a Russian coder named Ivan, seemed to have all the right qualifications for the senior engineering role. When he was interviewed over video last month, however, Pindrop’s recruiter noticed that Ivan’s facial expressions were slightly out of sync with his words.</i><p>&gt; <i>That’s because the candidate, whom the firm has since dubbed “Ivan X,” was a scammer using deepfake software and other generative AI tools in a bid to get hired by the tech company, said Pindrop CEO and co-founder Vijay Balasubramaniyan.</i><p>Hm, let&#x27;s read on.<p>&gt; <i>As for “Ivan X,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan said the startup used a new video authentication program it created to confirm he was a deepfake fraud.</i><p>Oh, I get it, it&#x27;s an ad for Pindrop.

Another remote employment fraud that is much more prevalent is &quot;Overemployment&quot;. You will get an applicant that is very skilled and hits the interview out of the park. But then when hired they are working many jobs and just trying to steal as many paychecks as they can until you fire them. They keep their first jobs resume clean and they all check out.<p>There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There&#x27;s lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can&#x27;t be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can&#x27;t make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;overemployed&#x2F;top&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;overemployed&#x2F;top&#x2F;</a>

From this month&#x27;s HN hiring, we might have received 30-40 resumes so far. Out of that, we have interviewed (or scheduled) around 20. There were no fake resumes; in fact we got very high quality resumes this time. There weren&#x27;t any fakes in the previous months as well (in noticeable numbers).<p>I am not saying it&#x27;s not happening. But we haven&#x27;t seen it happen on HN.

Solution is extremely simple, fly the candidate out for an in-person interview. A one-time plane ticket is a tiny expense compared to paying for the company to be a fully in-office operation, or paying a fraudster&#x27;s salary.<p>Onsite interviews were a normal practice just a few years ago.

Good. Fake jobs are posted all the time to &quot;gather intelligence&quot; at the expense of people who desperately want work.

Had one apply to my team last week, they had on their resume they worked with a tech company from 2019 to 2022 in a very specific role which would have been managed by my brother in law. Checked with him and he called BS on it. Wanted to drag them out a few rounds and do some last minute reschedules, but HR just slammed the door, saying they get lots of these now.

&quot;Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions&quot;<p>Getting a taste of their own medicine after all those fake or evergreen postings. Feels shitty doesn&#x27;t it? At least the people looking for hires still have a job to feed their families, unlike many on the job seeker side.

Companies hiring for remote positions shot first by creating fake openings to game candidates for their interests, salary expectations and skills. Repeatedly.<p>It&#x27;s hilarious that the same technique is now being used against them and companies are angry and frustrated. Too bad they are not actually human to understand what those feelings mean.

it does happen and companies don&#x27;t like to talk about it and most have existing actors still collecting paychecks. however, we have caught the whole gambit. A lot of applicants are good the problem is there is a subset that will go to extreme lengths to trick you. Competitors will do it, and even other governments will be depending on your industry.<p>We talked to some recruiters recently and they essentially said atleast 1 step of the hiring process must be in person unless a valid reason can be made. i.e. single mother taking care of child going through a divorce backed up by a court record.<p>One fun thing to do is stress test their GPU &#x2F; CPU out during part of a coding exam. (Only do this for 99% confirmed cases) This can slow the deepfake software down so much that it starts looking messed up and obvious. Securing employee onboarding with KYE IAM is also critical. Most of these people don&#x27;t put much effort on the 360 review of an applicant and verifications beyond video calls spot them early on. There are countless solutions to the problem so you need to be creative. These applicants think they are next level fakes, but a lot can be spotted a mile away.

Pretty simple: ask these remote hires to come to the office for the first two weeks for onboarding. That will solve a lot of problems.

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A friend of mine was a restaurant GM a while back and showed me what his applications looked like. They primarily take applicants through Indeed, and his list was absolutely flooded with foreign names of people that live nowhere near here. In his case, it was pretty trivial to sort through because they clearly didn&#x27;t live here.<p>Unless they&#x27;ve changed tactics, I think they might just blow up literally any job listing they can because the cost of not getting called back is nil anyway.

Somewhat inevitable. There is internet everywhere and the salary differentials to the US are wild

This is not new. This kind of things happening for long time especially for hunting high paying jobs in US. Now deep fake is just helping them a little. I joined tech industry in 2020, I did not know anything that how Pakistani&#x2F;Indian&#x2F;Bangladeshi companies get good bids from US clients until my friend joined industry next years. He joined a company who used to do this, and my friend help them clear interviews and get that company high paying jobs in US and he will be getting peanuts for the same job he got them probably 10k$&#x2F;month. They will create fake profile of candidate of US citizen and someone during interview has to pretend to be him. Yeah of course before it has to be real human now, AI can be anyone.<p>And I have been contacted many times to such kind of arrangement that the offered me that we will give you realistic fake US profile, you have to give interview, if you get hired, we will take some share of salary. And I denied, as I do not want to live with feeling of guilty of lying for earning more than I need where I live, I can live way better with what I make than my other fellow countrymen.

This could be largely solved by letting job seekers know up front that it <i>WILL</i> require an in-person interview, even if the position is remote — and then doing it. The price of a few round-trip airfares &amp; hotel nights is trivial to the cost&#x2F;benefit of a successful hire vs giving access to a malicious actor. And bringing in the final 2-4 candidates for an in-person day or two without technology has real benefits.<p>Want to add tech to the mix? Give the hired ones in-person a device to take home that will need to be verifiably at their stated location. Also require confirmation they are located where they say they are located, maybe even hire a PI to verify. And yes, traveling digital nomads could be accommodated; &quot;I&#x27;ll be in Bali the next month&quot;; &quot;fine, just send us a pic of your passport stamp and the location device will confirm it&quot;. Yes, it is a bit of light surveillance, you are paying for work and basic honesty and verifiability is not too big of an ask.<p>Sure, some of that could be fooled by working with an accomplice, but it would certainly cut down the fakers by orders of magnitude, and the NKs by ~100%.

&gt; Once hired, an impostor can install malware to demand a ransom from a company, or steal its customer data, trade secrets or funds.<p>I&#x27;m getting whiplash from how quickly this article jumps to conclusions. Most corporate cybersecurity is quite strong. Why is this the very first conclusion they come to? Not even that the fake profiles collect a salary, just.. &quot;virus!!!&quot;

A side effect of this that I&#x27;ve started to notice on a few of my repositories are fake accounts trying to bolster their perceived credibility when they are very obviously (terrible) AI accounts - down to their profile READMEs (on GitHub) that have obvious LLM output, pointing to links that don&#x27;t exist, etc. and in some cases even LinkedIn profiles that are completely fabricated.<p>I just had a PR opened that was a two character change, in Javascript, changing `if (!warned)` to `if (!== warned)`. They assured me, in an H1 no less, that they had tested everything and that it was fixing some problem, but didn&#x27;t say what.<p>What the hell is happening, and what are we supposed to collectively do about this? Or is this just some new norm we&#x27;ll have to adapt to?

The cooperate dystopia comes ever more into sight. Every interaction with the outside is on a budget. You can improve yourself (expensive, hard work) or you can spam your competitors with garbage, until they just cease to function.

Perhaps companies should go back to promoting their job openings at in person events? I remember a couple years ago when I went to a job faire, it was typical for recruiters to politely refuse your printed resume and instead suggest you apply through their online portal. Now that bots&#x2F;AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can&#x27;t seem to properly filter, I think it&#x27;s time to try a different approach.

Hired someone recently. I sat in on several remote interviews and a couple ... I was suspicious.<p>I didn&#x27;t see any &quot;AI&quot; candidates, but I was suspicious about a few &#x2F; if they were in fact who they said they were.<p>The part I worry about is that maybe I was just too suspicious and some poor guy was playing it straight and I gave a thumbs down due to my suspicions.

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Are they applying to all the fake jobs?

So fly the person out for an in-person interview back like we did in the ancient year of 2019? This seems like a total non-problem to me.

That sure won&#x27;t make it easier to apply for full remote jobs...

&gt; Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions<p>The empire strikes back. Until now, the job market, was flooded with false vacancies.

Fake job ads, fake job applicants...I&#x27;m starting to think I was accidentally prescient when I found my bookbinding hobby a few years back.<p>Oh, they&#x27;re nothing fancy, just perfect-bound with card covers and spines hand-lettered in silver paint on black bookbinder&#x27;s tape. But they&#x27;re workmanlike and sturdy and sound in the hand, and maybe it&#x27;ll be worth someone&#x27;s value to own words that not only have obviously been labored over at length, but that never change even when no one is looking at them.<p>Why not, I suppose. Printed words are already becoming a luxury, with the decline in material and workmanship in modern hardbound &quot;prestige&quot; editions reflecting their place among the economy of aspirational, status- and status-anxiety-signaling goods. Obviously I would have no market among these dreary neoliberal bourgeoisie, but I&#x27;m sure there are a few perverts on websites like this one who&#x27;d pay more for the produce of hours in an attic over hand tools and muttered swears, for something that even if it&#x27;s just a trade paperback still feels and reads the way a book should.

I think this article was written by AI. Seems like conspiracy nonsense.

Simple fix: Hire onshore persons, interview in person. Pay a living salary.

this is why we can&#x27;t have nice things.

Hem I miss a point: how the scammer earn money doing so? Because such credible deepfakes (not much credible anyway) are damn expensive...

Is it legal yet to require a Real ID when hiring in the US?

&quot;Flooding US companies&quot;? I don&#x27;t think so. The article lost my trust when it framed the North Korea incident like this:<p>&gt; More than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea for IT work<p>&quot;Impostors&quot; implies that the people they hired couldn&#x27;t do the job. That&#x27;s not true: These were people who just faked their location&#x2F;identity. They had the skills and worked for a long time for those companies. As far as the company was concerned, they were just regular employees. If they couldn&#x27;t do the job they would&#x27;ve been fired.<p>If these &quot;impostor&quot; employees actually <i>couldn&#x27;t</i> do the job and they somehow were able to stick around for as long as they did there&#x27;s a different sort of crisis going on in &quot;US companies&quot; that has to do with <i>management</i>.

This could be solved by companies charging $1 to apply for a given position. Same as charging people a small amount to send emails. Turn the economics in your favor.<p>Undoubtedly there would be many who would say &quot;I would never spend even one cent to apply for a job position&quot;. However, given that such positions tend to pay tens of dollars per hour, and given that a proper application takes at least a few minutes to fill out, I think this is economically unviable. And, of course, if I&#x27;m wrong and you now have thousands of applicants anyway, you then have a small fund to draw from for other recruiting activities like in-person interviews.