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Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”

• _daver 4y ago
  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?
• diek00 4y ago
  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.
• dqpb 4y ago
  So what happened next? Did you fire him or is he still working for you?
  • RegW 4y ago
    I'm so dumb that this question didn't even occur to me :-)
  • dopamean 4y ago
    I'm not sure how HR has handled it but within a few hours of him starting all of his access was revoked (email, slack, github, etc). I imagine HR fired him but I don't actually know what the official status is.
• codegeek 4y ago
  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.
  • gtirloni 4y ago
    How's that different than one person showing for an on-site interview and then another person on the first day at the job?
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Ease of doing so.
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    As an interviewee I'd consider the 1 day of co-working an indication that the job isn't as "100% remote" as the posting says. It's a problem now as some employers start trying to claw workers back into the office and pretend the last few years of productivity never happened. But I also have a good quality camera I turn on for interviews and meetings, so you can be sure it's me the whole time.
    • Ancalagon 4y ago
      How is that a problem though if the employer is upfront and honest that its to make sure you are who you say you are, and everyone honestly wants to get to know one another? As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the company is serious about offering me a long term position. If I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.
• probably_wrong 4y ago
  There was a thread on this topic about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694
  • preommr 4y ago
    lol, there's a story in there about some guy that got fired for being unqualified and then came back under a different name. That's some Costanza shit.
    • tuckerpo 4y ago
      with a fake mustache.
    • smegsicle 4y ago
      they say they want loyalty from their employees...
    • awinder 4y ago
      “was that wrong? should I not have done that?”
    • abledon 4y ago
      link : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669330
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• mistrial9 4y ago
  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"
• jrmg 4y ago
  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 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/770/my-lying-eyes
  • EamonnMR 4y ago
    I knew this story sounded familiar.
• fundad 4y ago
  No ID check and he was given a job? Does this happen to anyone here?
  • dopamean 4y ago
    It's not clear to me that the person who we talked to was not who he said he was. It's that the person who showed up was definitely not that person.
  • frellus 4y ago
    Usually ID checks happen at on-boarding, not interviewing, but still you would think it would be a perfect place to verify and then dismiss the person the same day. Actually I wouldn't even dismiss them... I'd list them as "never having shown up" so they were terminated for cause. Last thing I would do is give an unsub login credentials, e-mail access, etc. so they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.
  • dento 4y ago
    I've never had my ID checked by potential employer, except when the job requires security clearance. This is in europe, though.
    • fundad 4y ago
      I was told my state drivers license wasn’t sufficient and had to bring my passport. I’m in the states.
      • JJMcJ 4y ago
        Are you a non-US citizen? Because otherwise it makes no sense. Only about 25% of US citizens have passports. The DL or State ID card is the de facto national ID card.
        • fundad 4y ago
          US born brown dude, they would have accepted a social security card or birth certificate too but nothing below the federal level. At least I'm confident in the real identities of my coworkers (other than security of course).
• jawns 4y ago
  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.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    > I asked him a question, he would turn off his camera, pause for 10-20 seconds, answer the question Even without the camera, I'm not sure how he expected this to fly? Someone who claims to be proficient in English should not always pause for 10-20 seconds before answering a question.
    • matai_kolila 4y ago
      If you can get a job that's entirely async it might actually work out for a few weeks, and a few weeks of a western developer salary can last a year or more in some parts of the world.
    • mmsnberbar66 4y ago
      Depends on the question. I wouldn't mind waiting 30s for a thoughtful answer.
      • evan_ 4y ago
        yeah but if it's "How are you doing today" that might be kind of weird
    • anotheracctfo 4y ago
      I mean, yeah? There are very few people who can go straight from my question to the answer. And pausing to collect your thoughts is much better than saying uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm uhhh I ... uhhhhhhhhhhhhh Camera fuckery notwithstanding
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  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)
  • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    It doesn't make sense to suggest that the OP's company deserves this because some other companies did some things you didn't like. This idea that all businesses are bad and deserve to be cheated by their employees is extremely immature. > When companies outsource to dodgy subcontractors it's fine, but when the common man does it suddenly it's no good? Subcontractors are engaged on different terms and with specific contracts that require subcontractors to also engage in specific contracts. If an individual employee hands their logins to someone else and says "pretend its me" then it's clear fraud, not to mention a breach of the documents you agreed to when you signed. > In business this is called "business process outsourcing", No, it's not. Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. Hiring a programmer and giving them access to your company Slack and source code is entirely different.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      > Outsourcing specific operations is done with carefully limited access to only the data necessary. So carefully limited that insiders from said sweatshops end up taking (laughably low) bribes to perform things like fraudulent SIM swaps, access customer accounts, etc? In theory it must be all well and controlled and in a proper world nobody would be doing fraud, whether for themselves or a third-party. In reality there's very little oversight over it on the companies' side (and a slap on the wrist if by some miracle regulators actually get involved) so seeing them complain about being on the receiving end of this is some sweet schadenfreude.
• silisili 4y ago
  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?
  • plasma_beam 4y ago
    When it happened to us, we paid the person for their couple days on the job before we fired them. I'm not sure if you're legally obligated to, but it was easier to pay to make it go away.
  • dopamean 4y ago
    In our case the issue was identified basically immediately. His access to our systems was revoked and we're in the process of trying to figure out how, if possible, we can get back the laptop we sent him. I'm not sure how pay will be handled for the few hours he was an employee.
• flowersjeff 4y ago
  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)
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    I'm not actually sure it hurts real candidates? If garbage is flooding the market, it forces employers to pay higher wages for a chance to actually get something good. This pushes wages up for real, skilled engineers.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
      How do higher wages discourage fraud?
      • jxramos 4y ago
        it's probably to avoid spinning the wheels down in the budget garbage being referenced here and wasting a bunch of time. Pay the upfront cost and leapfrog over the delay.
        • Attrecomet 4y ago
          That only works if the upfront cost actually does anything to make the fraud more difficult. Just paying higher salaries does fuck all, the fraudsters will adapt to the higher prices and reap more profits.
          • 4y ago
• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  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?
  • rr808 4y ago
    If you can fake an actual interviewer, asking for references is easy.
    • sebastianconcpt 4y ago
      But you'll see good or bad signals on the quality of the references and their stories, no?
      • rr808 4y ago
        I really meant who is doing the references. Its hard to confirm who was their old boss or colleague. Is hacker6969@gmail.com really their old boss? You could ask a Linkedin account but that has no guarantees either.
        • sebastianconcpt 4y ago
          An old school phone call to the previous employer to background check at least the very basics?
          • rr808 4y ago
            The problem is HR will do the basic like dates of employment but will never give a rating. Old managers probably have moved on.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    If they are willing to game the system by using a different person during the interview, what suggests that they would not have fake references listed to help corroborate. Seems like one of the first things I'd set up if I was running this scam.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  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.
  • ryandrake 4y ago
    > 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. Yes, "camera isn't working" should be the easiest problem for the company to solve! "OK, we're overnighting a laptop with a working webcam to your address in our HR system. Please use that known working camera tomorrow."
• papandada 4y ago
  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.
  • frellus 4y ago
    "a couple of months" ... why not immediately?
    • papandada 4y ago
      Funnily enough, the interview fraud (I wasn't a part of that) only got brought up after he was gone. Between being at a very passive government client, plus company culture, it's almost more amazing that he was able to burn bridges at a place people spent years accomplishing nothing. edit: I briefly doubted myself, but I checked on his LinkedIn and he has it listed as a 6-month engagement in 2013, with a significant gap until the next role. Even mentioned him to my wife in chats during that time span.
      • frellus 4y ago
        ouch.. this sort of makes me think of Office Space for some reason. "I looked into it more deeply and I found that apparently what happened is that he was laid off five years ago and no one ever told him, but through some kind of glitch in the payroll department, he still gets a paycheck." "So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch." "So um, Milton has been let go?" "Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally." "We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end."
• plasma_beam 4y ago
  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).
• xlii 4y ago
  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.
• spmurrayzzz 4y ago
  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 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.
  • dopamean 4y ago
    Thanks for the interesting reply. I'm curious who "we" is that you reference several time. Do you work for an organization dealing with this problem?
• jd_illa 4y ago
  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?
• cabirum 4y ago
  The safest course of action is keeping 100% remote but interviewing in-person at least once.
• seren 4y ago
  Someone just posted a story on "being impersonated" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953
• noasaservice 4y ago
  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.
• ericol 4y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669193
  • rozap 4y ago
    > but at the same time also weary as our experience with coders from India is far from stellar. it boggles the mind that you apparently don't understand selection bias, and would say something like this on a public forum, in the year 2022.
    • ericol 4y ago
      That, in exchange, was proven right empirically. > and would say something like this on a public forum Why, is it a crime against humanity, or what? Based as well on my experience, there are things said constantly in public forums that are much worst than this. How high is the moral pedestal you are standing on?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  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.
• dominotw 4y ago
  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.
  • FerociousTimes 4y ago
    How many fraudulent candidates did you guys hire exactly?
    • dominotw 4y ago
      4 that i know of. It was my employer not me personally.
• explorigin 4y ago
  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.)
• peacemaker 4y ago
  Absolutely! I made a comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 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.
  • lazide 4y ago
    It wouldn’t surprise me either if the candidate paid them for them to do it, with promises from them that he’ll be making tons of money from a clueless company. Grifts like this usually take advantage of multiple parties.
  • jxramos 4y ago
    is it possible to include language in the contract that comes with a penalty for things that result in this? At the least a money back guarantee.
• kodah 4y ago
  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+.
  • danaris 4y ago
    The problem is the flip side: companies that demand 10+ years of experience in technologies that have been around for 5, and similar absurdities. More simply and commonly, the amount of experience required for supposedly "junior" positions has gone up without commensurate increases in pay. And far, far, far too many companies demand that a candidate be able to hit the ground running instantly—that they have exactly the experience and skills required for this position, rather than being someone who may not know every possible way to configure Kubernetes, but who's flexible and both willing and able to learn quickly. I would never do it personally (both out of a sense of honesty, and a deep-seated fear that I'd be found out), but I can certainly see why lots of people lie on their resumes.
    • splitstud 4y ago
• softcactus 4y ago
  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.
• datalopers 4y ago
  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?
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I can certainly see large companies failing to identify and then when it finally comes clear it takes them months to fire.
  • lumost 4y ago
    If the person has some level of tech skill, then they might be able to coast for years. A junior engineer gets hired as a senior engineer, a D student gets the role that an A student would have gotten otherwise. etc. etc.
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  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.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  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.
  • joezydeco 4y ago
    I think even this model can be gamed. I interviewed a contractor over video a few weeks ago. Both of us live on camera. The candidate wore glasses and I could see their eyes darting back and forth across their screen while answering questions. There were also a high number of really abnormal pauses before responding. I'm 99% convinced the candidate was being fed answers by someone else listening in.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      Ask anyone who is involved in certifications. During the height of COVID, a huge amount of effort had to go into preventing remote test proctoring from being gamed--of course often inconveniencing the honest test takers.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      Not to be too harsh, and judging by your response you did detect this bad interviewer, but IMO if someone can game your interviews in that manner, you need to re-evaluate how you do interviews. E.g. a big part of our interviews is to ask about previous projects, pitfalls they hit, reasons they made certain technology choices, etc. I'm 100% sure that if the interviewer had no idea what they were talking about and was being fed answers it would be extremely apparent.
    • xboxnolifes 4y ago
      No idea if this was what was going on, but when I'm interviewing my eyes are moving between 3 things: The camera for eye contact, the interviewer's video so I can read body language, and my notes/resume so I don't forget to say anything.
• sleton38234234 4y ago
  >> 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.
• blablabla123 4y ago
  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...
• joshgachnang 4y ago
  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.
• layman51 4y ago
  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.
• vdfs 4y ago
  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
  • smt88 4y ago
    This is a brilliant scam. If he can fool 100 companies per month with this and only gets caught (on average) after a couple of weeks, he's making an incredibly good income.
• mekoka 4y ago
  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.
• mkl95 4y ago
  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.
• yibg 4y ago
  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.
• brightball 4y ago
  I’ve seen it at 2 different companies so far.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  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.
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• jmartin2683 4y ago
  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.
• gk1 4y ago
  There’s also this, which is a slightly different kind of fraud made possible by remote work: https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed
• twinge 4y ago
  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.
• schnevets 4y ago
  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).
• Havoc 4y ago
  Nope. Pretty niche field that has small world vibes and such a person would get flushed out pretty fast
• simonswords82 4y ago
  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.
  • rednerrus 4y ago
    You're not taking IDs until after the offer has been accepted. How do you verify the person who was in the interview was the person you hired?
    • anoother 4y ago
      You have the person taking the ID included in one of the interviews. It's not that hard.
• philip1209 4y ago
  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.
  • flowersjeff 4y ago
    There are many projects that have experimented with something like this - and personally, I think this is the way to go. Staked ID...
  • tmtvl 4y ago
    Let's hope not, that sounds absolutely terrible. With my physical wallet, if I lose it I can call the bank to get my cards frozen, I can go to town hall to get my ID reissued,... Whereas with crypto if I lose my key/wallet, I'm SOL.
• H8crilA 4y ago
  Has anyone considered opening a criminal case against such people? Evidence of fraud shouldn't be too hard to collect.
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    Is fraud actually being prosecuted reliably? My observation given the vast amount of financial fraud occurring everywhere (with a paper trail), fraud is one of those things that's only selectively prosecuted when you piss off someone powerful enough or with the right connections. Even if we assume fraud actually starts being prosecuted seriously, I'd assume the astronomical quantity of financial fraud out there would take priority over a relatively little amount of employment/candidate fraud.
    • H8crilA 4y ago
      I don't think there is a massive problem with financial fraud. What would be an example?
      • criticas 4y ago
        Wage Theft? A 2017 report claimed that US wage theft (by companies against employees) was 100 times the size of reported robberies ($50 B vs $438M). https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/ https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...
        • H8crilA 4y ago
          US GDP is about $21T, so about 420 times bigger. Or to put it differently, about 0.2% of the GDP. Also, wage theft isn't fraud exactly.
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        UK has a massive problem with phone scams pretending to be tech support or our tax office for example. They get victims to wire money to the account of a money mule who then cashes it out. This all happens over the normal banking system - enforcement is so bad that they're not even trying to cover their tracks by using gift cards or crypto.
• sputknick 4y ago
  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.
• schainks 4y ago
  When candidates tell me they’re in the US but our conversation has a 3 second lag, that’s usually a red flag.
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• jlangenauer 4y ago
  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.
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    > - 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. I get this. I also just did like 10 rounds of interviews and between google meets, zoom, teams, phone calls, I would say there was a 50% failure rate of somebody on the call having a non working webcam or another issue. I actually missed an opportunity at a job because the HR lady was bizarrely inflexible. I called, no answer, teams, couldn't let me in because of org permissions, yada yada. At some point I had rescheduled for the third time and just replied "look, I don't know what the issue is, but I will be happy to do an in-person interview". Never got a call back. So... tech problems do exist. I am on a phone call with a client right now who spent 10 minutes trying to get a screen share working. What can I do?
    • Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
      Tech problems exist on the employer's end, that's all on them. If their Teams permissions don't allow someone external to join, then they aren't fit to be even trying to do remote hiring. In 2022 there's virtually no excuse for a non-functional webcam on the candidate side though. If they don't have a dedicated camera, then most laptops come with one as standard nowadays. If they don't have a laptop, then they at least have a basic smartphone. You'd have to be incredibly unlucky to have no webcam, no laptop and no smartphone. Yes, people without smartphones exist. But they are an absolute minority.
• kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  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.
• frozenlettuce 4y ago
  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).
• PointyFluff 4y ago
  Constantly.
• benjaminwootton 4y ago
  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!
  • Nextgrid 4y ago
    As a UK contractor myself, would you be able to share some tips as to how to give reassurance to the client that you're not doing that? With easy, well-defined tasks it's easy - just do the work and the regular commits prove that you've done the work on time and aren't taking the piss. But in my case I'm sometimes stuck on long-running tasks that involve dealing with lots of legacy technical debt where I have a local branch going for 2 weeks that's a complete mess and doesn't pass CI or where I have to spend lots of time thinking about the solution and trying different approaches before settling on something I'm actually happy to commit and build upon. During that time, from the client's perspective it might look like nothing is happening, so I try to make up for it by taking on smaller, auxiliary tasks which don't take much time but can be completed and pushed to at least show some activity. Before remote you show up in the office and everyone assumes you're working so this wasn't a concern at all.
  • Beaver117 4y ago
    They're literally contractors for that reason, why are you surprised?
    • benjaminwootton 4y ago
      Because I was contracting these people for Monday-Friday 9-5 approx (i.e typical working week rather than fixed deliverables) and the contract said likewise. It was therefore a breach of contract, and I was surprised because I thought people had higher professional standards.
      • boltzmann-brain 4y ago
        Then they're not contractors, they're full time employees that you refuse to pay the benefits for. Given this level of cutting corners, I'm not surprised your counterparts are pulling one over on you as well.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  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.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    > 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. What kind of argument is that? These people aren’t trying to get on 1099 and sure as shit won’t be good, honest contractors either.
  • nradov 4y ago
    Contract-to-hire positions only appeal to the most desperate, least qualified candidates. Those who are already employed elsewhere or have other offers aren't likely to accept an offer that leaves them in a precarious state.
• gigel82 4y ago
  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).
• nradov 4y ago
  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?
• geggam 4y ago
  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.
• deeptote 4y ago
  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.
  • AdrianB1 4y ago
    2 wrongs don't make it right.
    • deeptote 4y ago
      Okay, George Washington. You sure showed me the error of my ways.
• firstSpeaker 4y ago
  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.
  • dilyevsky 4y ago
    Swapping the team that did initial meet&greet for B team to do actual work is classic contractor move especially if client makes the mistake of not including specific names on the written contract or doesn’t care to. I’ve seen it in non-IT industries like construction too.
    • deleted 4y ago
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  • nicholasjarnold 4y ago
    Yes, I have direct first-hand experience with the "presenting one thing in initial talks pre-signature, and getting something completely different later" with the "big consulting firms". We spoke with actual senior engineers with highly relevant experience up front, and the dev team they sent to us to actually do work (completely with entire suite of product, ux, qa, etc etc etc...packing as many as possible) were people of a...lesser experience level. I'm being polite here. I have a friend working in the business side of one of the large consulting firms, and the insight I got there is that sales is ahead of engineering staffing by _a lot_. In other words, the supply is being outstripped by the demand. Not wanting to leave money on the table these firms (or at least the very large "name brand" one my friend works for) will sign for projects which they do not have bench staff to fill. They then hit the streets and hire whoever can walk and chew gum at the same time. Now we have to work alongside these people, who themselves are not so much to blame in many cases. They are pawns in the often-fraudulent game called Software Consulting, Inc. It's great fun. I feel for you.
• extragood 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • mihaitodor 4y ago
    Consider avoiding 3rd party screening solutions and put in the effort up front to talk to candidates in detail. Asking people to go through such hoops before they can even talk to a tech person from the company will put many good people off.
    • extragood 4y ago
      I kinda glossed over the interview structure for the sake of brevity, but they do speak to one technical person (me) before the tech assessment. I'm the hiring manager, and I see my primary role as getting the candidate excited for the position and to answer any initial questions. I've already narrowed down the applicant pool through resume review at that stage, so most people make it to the technical assessment from there. I feel like technical assessment shouldn't come too much later in the process: we're trying to be respectful of time on both sides, and while the assessment is 2 hours long, it's only completed once by the candidate, whereas if we have the technical interviewer come earlier on in the process, it will add many more hours across candidates who would have otherwise been filtered out. As far as using 3rd party solutions: I see your point, and actually used to administer homespun "code challenges". The downside with that approach is that it adds a ton of overhead. As terrible as it may seem, we may not be able to invest that kind of time unless we're willing to be more heavy-handed in candidate selection early on. In at least one case, there was a candidate who had a fairly unremarkable resume but really impressed us in the interview process, and they may have been eliminated earlier on if we were more selective from the beginning.
• balls187 4y ago
  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.
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Do you have legal right to claim their compensation?
• justinzollars 4y ago
  Scary. I can't believe someone would have the nerve to do this. Fire fast.
• germandiago 4y ago
  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.
• Beaver117 4y ago
  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
• ericholscher 4y ago
  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-are-impersonating-open-source-devs/ https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/09/watch-out-ad-scammers...
• avb 4y ago
  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.
• drusepth 4y ago
  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.
  • dymk 4y ago
    If a different person shows up, why even give them until end of day?
    • adamredwoods 4y ago
      True. Even if they seem nice and a quick learner, the identity fraud can be a security issue.
  • biztos 4y ago
    > The guy... was definitely not him But: > We gave him the day That was very nice of you, but my first thought in that situation would be security. Your best case here is you have a fraudster "accessing the terminal" -- but maybe he's otherwise harmless?
    • drusepth 4y ago
      Standard onboarding had him paired with our director of engineering for the full day, who was aware of the situation and handled the security aspects. AFAIK it ended up just being a case of recruiter fraud.
• maestroia 4y ago
  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.
  • clusterhacks 4y ago
    Yes! I have a long-ish tenure at my current org (10+ years). I have had at least two co-workers in that time window who were clearly having someone else do their work assignments off-hours. Honestly, it kind of worked for them. I was very naive about it and it took me a long time to realize that the reason both co-workers could not discuss technical issues at work (or "their" own code) was that they simply didn't know anything (and it wasn't "their" code). As far as I know, only a very small number of tech people suspected anything.
• 98codes 4y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953
• ChrisCinelli 4y ago
  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.
• twawaaay 4y ago
  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.
• xcskier56 4y ago
  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.
  • grahamplace 4y ago
    I'm not sure the exact rules here (and you might not be in the US), but you might want to avoid asking candidates "about where they are from" > Any questions that reveal your age, race, national origin, gender, religion, marital status and sexual orientation are off-limits. > "State and federal laws make discrimination based on certain protected categories, such as national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, disabilities, arrest and conviction record, military discharge status, race, gender, or pregnancy status, illegal. > Any question that asks a candidate to reveal information about such topics without the question having a job related basis will violate the various state and federal discrimination laws," Lori Adelson, a labor and employment attorney and partner with law firm Arnstein & Lehr, tells Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/11-illegal-interview-questions-2013-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/11-illegal-interview-questio...
    • happyopossum 4y ago
      Err, not relevant here. GP specifically said the interviewee “was from a town somewhat close to a city I used to live in”, so this is information that was already disclosed. If you’re interviewing for a US position, making small talk about where the interviewee lives is absolutely not out of bounds.
• myhn 4y ago
  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.
  • flowersjeff 4y ago
    How fun (not) is that....
• jethronethro 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
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• myhn 4y ago
  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.
• jjk166 4y ago
  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.
  • ggnnhh 4y ago
    The problem is that you hire someone legit that could pass any verification, but the person you talks to once hired is not longer the candidate. If you don’t notice it on day one, it’s almost impossible to detect it afterwards. The fake dev could be somewhat competent even and do a great job.
    • jjk166 4y ago
      Okay but you know the name and identifying personal details about the person you verified, and the person you talk to once hired needs to give you their photo ID. If the person you are interacting with doesn't match the photo on their ID, or if the name or identifying information on the ID is different from the one you verified, then it should be immediately clear they are different people. It's the person who interviewed that had to be the fake.
      • ggnnhh 4y ago
        Nobody ever checked my id when starting on a new team. And I never use my webcam so on remote teams the only think they know is the name I give them and my voice.
        • jjk166 4y ago
          And that you accomplish your tasks well enough that they are willing to keep paying you. And that you have the login credentials of the person they were expecting. And you are familiar with the things they expect you to be familiar with. I mean if you can somehow find someone who is able and willing to do your job for you for sufficiently lower than your salary that you'd be willing to pay them and who wouldn't just get the job (and the full paycheck) for themselves without the middle man, then cool, go drink margaritas on the beach while your subcontractor slaves away. As long as they're not like foreign spies or something, why would anyone care?
• ChrisCinelli 4y ago
  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!
  • boltzmann-brain 4y ago
    > dedicated engineers that were not so dedicated what do you mean by that?
• flowersjeff 4y ago
  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...)
• victor9000 4y ago
  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.
• unity1001 4y ago
  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.
• lormayna 4y ago
  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.
• danesparza 4y ago
  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.
• than3 4y ago
  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.
  • throwaway09223 4y ago
    Regarding in-person I9 checks, I had a very interesting experience recently with a friend who was hired at a big 4 accounting firm. They deputize a friend of the employee (me) to verify that they have checked the I9 in person. They use a service for this: https://www.lawlogix.com/ https://www.lawlogix.com/ It was a very strange experience. Here I am a totally unrelated party becoming an "authorized representative" of the firm to look at a document and verify it's real. There was no real verification of me, mind you. I could have been anyone. I have no idea how normalized this sort of thing has become, but I was quite surprised that they appoint some random individual rather than have an actual employee do the document verification.
    • Test0129 4y ago
      I found this process strange at the last company I worked. While the service required photo evidence of the documents they allowed you to elect a "representative" who can verify the documents physically. Typically at other jobs I had that were remote a company official would verify photo copies of the documents and use either a video chat or other means to corroborate them.
• lucifargundam 4y ago
  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.
• Melatonic 4y ago
  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
• deleted 4y ago
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• enviclash 4y ago
  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.
• ParksNet 4y ago
  What was the national background of the candidate?
• ergonaught 4y ago
  Deja Vu? This exact question and set of circumstances was Asked previously. Ahh, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343 Which referenced: https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-...
• RavingGoat 4y ago
  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.
  • itronitron 4y ago
    Five years ago I would have been sympathetic to the OP, but not really anymore. Just running the numbers, if a person interviews at ten companies the odds are very high they will come across multiple companies with shady, broken, or manipulative hiring practices.
• AdrianB1 4y ago
  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.
• ggnnhh 4y ago
  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.
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    Can you explain how you were paid? Was the company U.S. based?
    • ggnnhh 4y ago
      The front guy got the money and then sent it to us. One of the companies was US based but the front guy is a freelancer from a western european country (the devs and I are from eastern countries, mostly Russia and Ukraine)
• tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
  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.
• noodle 4y ago
  > 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.
• bs7280 4y ago
  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.
• drsim 4y ago
  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.
  • mriet 4y ago
    I was at a remote company last year and hiring (was lead, building the team) and right before one interview, I reviewed a resume and saw that there were.. 2 jobs for the same time period. The best way to get the truth is to make all answers acceptable. me: "So, job A was a 40 hour/week job, right?" him: "Yup" me: "But you were also doing work for job B then right." him: "Yeah, basically" me: "So you basically did job B whenever there was some slack for job A?" him: "exactly." I was dumbstruck internally and then just wrapped up the interview politely and let him know a couple days later that it wasn't a good fit. No use alerting him that he should change his resume (for other possibile employers..)
    • anoother 4y ago
      I don't see an issue here… He was completely honest about working two jobs at once, to the extent of putting it on his resume. Surely you'd have followed this up with some questions about how the contracts for those two jobs were worded, or that you'd expect someone to be working full-time for yourselves and wether that would be acceptable?
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• pmarreck 4y ago
  You thought that going 100% remote wouldn't have any drawbacks... You apparently thought wrong LOL
• robswc 4y ago
  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.
• v1l 4y ago
  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.
• westoncb 4y ago
  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.
• Kharvok 4y ago
  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.
• nottorp 4y ago
  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?
• kinghuang 4y ago
  This sounds related to the other HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953 In that case, someone pretended to be Connor Tumbleson to get hired.
• faangiq 4y ago
• yosito 4y ago
  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.
  • sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Please! If there was a way to skip the ridiculous interview process and go directly to work, I would do it every time. This isn’t scalable and it’s literally fraud, since you’re being paid. But if someone is going to go through all that trouble, at least wait a week and see.
    • Kalium 4y ago
      Sometimes there are issues beyond the... creative representation of the candidate. From the company's perspective, this could easily land them in legal hot water as they now have no idea who the "employee" is or what their legal status is. Also of note is that there's a lot of stories here about companies waiting more than a week. Surprisingly few conclude with "...and it was great work, so we kept them!".
  • adamredwoods 4y ago
    Possible security issues, stealing data, corporate raider.
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  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.
• adamredwoods 4y ago
  Yes, I've had this happen at a place I had worked for.
• pyuser583 4y ago
  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.
• maddynator 4y ago
  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-cheating-candidate https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/how-to-catch-a-cheati... * if this falls under self-promotion, I can remove it.
• bravura 4y ago
  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.
• throwaway4220 4y ago
  I recently saw a video where someone is lip syncing answers to recruiter questions over a zoom call
• jbhouse 4y ago
  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)
• MaysonL 4y ago
  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.
• dev_0 4y ago
  Is he an Indian? This is well known
• shaneofalltrad 4y ago
  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
• wombat-man 4y ago
  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.
• donatj 4y ago
  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.
• cendyne 4y ago
  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.
• alligatorplum 4y ago
  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.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  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!
• deleted 4y ago
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• AbegYa 4y ago
• puntofisso 4y ago
  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-to-be-me/ 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.
• greysonhaile8 4y ago