13 ms·

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

182 points by arizen 1y ago

jacknews 1y ago
Are they applying to all the fake jobs?
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Yeah, this seems like a fair turnaround for the folks who've been wasting applicants' time for decades.
  - bell-cot 1y ago
    > ...seems like a fair turnaround for... Except the "them" who've been wasting applicants' time for decades is not the same as the "them" who are facing the flood of fake job seekers. It's generally preferable that "justice" treats innocent parties and guilty parties quite differently.
    - rightbyte 1y ago
      I can't stress this enough. There seem to be a great desire among some to punnish totally uninvolved people for some sort of systematic problem. Imagine being a prince from Nigeria ...
    - hackable_sand 1y ago
      Idk dude. The schadenfreude is real. If a company wants to self-immolate to chase shadows, I will happily watch.
  - throwaway647837 1y ago
    Is it a fair turnaround for the honest folks just trying to get a job the old fashioned way, whose resumes will get drowned in the sea of AI trash?
    - vlod 1y ago
      Pretty much so. Next to impossible to actually apply to a job. I'm very experienced, live in the US and a friendly chap who interviews well, but because of everyone is using AI (applicants, recruiters, employers), it's next to impossible to get a reply to any posting or get trough to a 'human'.
- angra_mainyu 1y ago
  AI interviewer interviewing AI interviewee - welcome to 2025
gibbitz 1y ago
AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense. Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired. A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it. So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason. If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.
- codegladiator 1y ago
  > putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks. they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit) and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact. i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.
  - 1y ago
derelicta 1y ago
That sure won't make it easier to apply for full remote jobs...
s3p 1y ago
> Once hired, an impostor can install malware to demand a ransom from a company, or steal its customer data, trade secrets or funds. I'm getting whiplash from how quickly this article jumps to conclusions. Most corporate cybersecurity is quite strong. Why is this the very first conclusion they come to? Not even that the fake profiles collect a salary, just.. "virus!!!"
- Loudergood 1y ago
  Most? Maybe for large companies. I work with a lot of SMBs and half of them are happy to use the gateway built into their cable modem, and install no additional security whatsoever. While running OSs that are beyond end of life.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Ever thus. The first programming job I had after high school, I got in part by pointing out that I hadn't previously seen Windows XP Pro machines with publicly routable IPv4 addresses, and suggesting one reason for their persistent slowness might be the effect of putting unfirewalled XP machines on the public Internet - a very bad idea, even in 2004.
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  [flagged]
jeswin 1y ago
From this month's HN hiring, we might have received 30-40 resumes so far. Out of that, we have interviewed (or scheduled) around 20. There were no fake resumes; in fact we got very high quality resumes this time. There weren't any fakes in the previous months as well (in noticeable numbers). I am not saying it's not happening. But we haven't seen it happen on HN.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  HN doesn't seem like a very lucrative pool for scams like this one. You don't see many meh corporate development jobs posted here, which are they ones you can fake for months or years. Hard to do that when you're working daily with the founder or a smaller team.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    You give way too much credit to the types of companies that get YC funding. I’ve seen a lot of meh corporate jobs posted here with corp dev type wages.
    - teqsun 1y ago
      What would you call "corp dev type wages"?
      - scarface_74 1y ago
        Starting salaries around $70-$80K, senior salaries around $140K-$160K and “architects” around $175K. This is in the Atlanta market where I use to live before I started working remotely and moved. I got this email from a recruiter there. It’s about the same in most major non west coast markets (Starting on page 26) https://motionrecruitment.com/hubfs/TSG-25/Atlanta-IT-Salary-Guide-2025.pdf https://motionrecruitment.com/hubfs/TSG-25/Atlanta-IT-Salary... Compare that to any of the BigTech or adjacent companies where entry level developers are getting return offers from their internships of $150K-$175K.
Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
Had one apply to my team last week, they had on their resume they worked with a tech company from 2019 to 2022 in a very specific role which would have been managed by my brother in law. Checked with him and he called BS on it. Wanted to drag them out a few rounds and do some last minute reschedules, but HR just slammed the door, saying they get lots of these now.
specialp 1y ago
Another remote employment fraud that is much more prevalent is "Overemployment". You will get an applicant that is very skilled and hits the interview out of the park. But then when hired they are working many jobs and just trying to steal as many paychecks as they can until you fire them. They keep their first jobs resume clean and they all check out. There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There's lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can't be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can't make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect. https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/top/ https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/top/
- sneak 1y ago
  Why do you call it fraud? It's not fraudulent.
- hackable_sand 1y ago
  If it's not illegal then why are you using words like "fraud" and "steal"?
  - specialp 1y ago
    Because it is the technical definition of the words and that is exactly what it is. Something not being illegal does not mean that it isn't fraud or stealing. Misrepresenting your availability and willfully trying to cover that is is fraud. Taking someone's money while fraudulently not working for it is stealing. I know overemployment people will rationalize it some other way but it doesn't change that.
    - sneak 1y ago
      If those so "overemployed" (that is to say, working multiple jobs, a normal and common thing to do in society) were not working for their employer, they would be dismissed quickly. Nobody's stealing anything in these situations.
InDubioProRubio 1y ago
The cooperate dystopia comes ever more into sight. Every interaction with the outside is on a budget. You can improve yourself (expensive, hard work) or you can spam your competitors with garbage, until they just cease to function.
hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
This could be solved by companies charging $1 to apply for a given position. Same as charging people a small amount to send emails. Turn the economics in your favor. Undoubtedly there would be many who would say "I would never spend even one cent to apply for a job position". However, given that such positions tend to pay tens of dollars per hour, and given that a proper application takes at least a few minutes to fill out, I think this is economically unviable. And, of course, if I'm wrong and you now have thousands of applicants anyway, you then have a small fund to draw from for other recruiting activities like in-person interviews.
- vlod 1y ago
  Works both ways. How many time have devs wasted their time where it says 'competitive salary' (which they don't want to reveal) but in fact it's nowhere close. Or a job description which has X, but X is a very small subset but in fact its a mostly legacy system using Y. Want to pay me for my time?
- confidantlake 1y ago
  Great, now we get 100x more fake jobs flooding the internet.
lenerdenator 1y ago
Good. Fake jobs are posted all the time to "gather intelligence" at the expense of people who desperately want work.
- techjamie 1y ago
  The irony isn't lost on me how employers will post ghost positions, and use automation to sort through applications faster. While at the same time condemning automation from the applicant side, even if the automation is used in good faith.
josefritzishere 1y ago
I think this article was written by AI. Seems like conspiracy nonsense.
riskable 1y ago
"Flooding US companies"? I don't think so. The article lost my trust when it framed the North Korea incident like this: > More than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea for IT work "Impostors" implies that the people they hired couldn't do the job. That's not true: These were people who just faked their location/identity. They had the skills and worked for a long time for those companies. As far as the company was concerned, they were just regular employees. If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired. If these "impostor" employees actually couldn't do the job and they somehow were able to stick around for as long as they did there's a different sort of crisis going on in "US companies" that has to do with management.
- wpietri 1y ago
  So one, I don't think you know what the word "impostor" means. If somebody faked your wife's identity, I think you could be reasonably upset even if she could "do the job" adequately, and it would be weird indeed to say she wasn't an impostor. But two, are you serious with "If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired"? I think the most charitable assumption I could make is that you must not have been in the working world long. There are plenty of places that are bad noticing and getting rid of underperformers, even when everybody involved is well meaning. If somebody is actively running it as a scam, it could be hard indeed to detect. And really, they don't have to evade detection forever. Even a few months of paycheck may be more than enough for them to cover the costs of getting the jobs.
toss1 1y ago
This could be largely solved by letting job seekers know up front that it WILL require an in-person interview, even if the position is remote — and then doing it. The price of a few round-trip airfares & hotel nights is trivial to the cost/benefit of a successful hire vs giving access to a malicious actor. And bringing in the final 2-4 candidates for an in-person day or two without technology has real benefits. Want to add tech to the mix? Give the hired ones in-person a device to take home that will need to be verifiably at their stated location. Also require confirmation they are located where they say they are located, maybe even hire a PI to verify. And yes, traveling digital nomads could be accommodated; "I'll be in Bali the next month"; "fine, just send us a pic of your passport stamp and the location device will confirm it". Yes, it is a bit of light surveillance, you are paying for work and basic honesty and verifiability is not too big of an ask. Sure, some of that could be fooled by working with an accomplice, but it would certainly cut down the fakers by orders of magnitude, and the NKs by ~100%.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  No way in hell am I consenting to "install a location tracking device" and "send us proof of all travel plans". "A bit of light surveillance" my ass.
  - toss1 1y ago
    Fine. You are free to obfuscate and/or lie about your identity and location, and they are free to hire or not hire you. Who said anything about install? They give you a company phone. And you really think it is unreasonable for a person/company paying you money to do a task to know where on the planet you are located, emergency contacts, etc.? What happens when you get hit by a bus in Bangkok or have a scuba incident in Bali and are in the hospital for a week or worse? You just go dark and they have no way to send aid or even get status on the work you are now suddenly not doing, or obtain the current files so someone else can make progress? Of course there are many inconsequential gigs/jobs for which it doesn't matter if you disappear, or lie about your identity or location, or are a North Korean spy trying to destroy the company, and you're welcome to work for those. But I'm 100% in favor of remote work, and I would not remotely consider hiring someone for any consequential project or position without knowing they are who they say they are and they are where they say they are located. And from a Corporate and National Security perspective, while I consider Return To Office largely outrageous, it seems quite reasonable for simple physical security measures to verify an employee is who and where they say they are. Even more so considering the massive amounts of both nation-state-level corporate espionage and remote work fraud going on.
techjamie 1y ago
A friend of mine was a restaurant GM a while back and showed me what his applications looked like. They primarily take applicants through Indeed, and his list was absolutely flooded with foreign names of people that live nowhere near here. In his case, it was pretty trivial to sort through because they clearly didn't live here. Unless they've changed tactics, I think they might just blow up literally any job listing they can because the cost of not getting called back is nil anyway.
- sneak 1y ago
  "foreign names"? Applying to a restaurant?
  - techjamie 1y ago
    I should probably specify that the restaurant is in a low population area where everybody pretty much knows everyone else. And the botted applications came from people that lived nowhere near there, and were from a demographic that was all but absent from the area. Nobody is moving across the nation to a town in the middle of nowhere to make $10/hr.
    - confidantlake 1y ago
      Why is he posting on indeed instead of just posting a sign in the window or just putting the word out if "everyone knows everyone"? Especially for a $10/hr restaurant job?
throwanem 1y ago
Fake job ads, fake job applicants...I'm starting to think I was accidentally prescient when I found my bookbinding hobby a few years back. Oh, they're nothing fancy, just perfect-bound with card covers and spines hand-lettered in silver paint on black bookbinder's tape. But they're workmanlike and sturdy and sound in the hand, and maybe it'll be worth someone's value to own words that not only have obviously been labored over at length, but that never change even when no one is looking at them. Why not, I suppose. Printed words are already becoming a luxury, with the decline in material and workmanship in modern hardbound "prestige" editions reflecting their place among the economy of aspirational, status- and status-anxiety-signaling goods. Obviously I would have no market among these dreary neoliberal bourgeoisie, but I'm sure there are a few perverts on websites like this one who'd pay more for the produce of hours in an attic over hand tools and muttered swears, for something that even if it's just a trade paperback still feels and reads the way a book should.
mmierz 1y ago
Solution is extremely simple, fly the candidate out for an in-person interview. A one-time plane ticket is a tiny expense compared to paying for the company to be a fully in-office operation, or paying a fraudster's salary. Onsite interviews were a normal practice just a few years ago.
- masfuerte 1y ago
  I agree, but as a non-American I wouldn't want to travel to America for anything work-related at the moment without a business visa, and the hassle of getting one would make hiring foreign workers much more of a chore.
- aitchnyu 1y ago
  So many visa and proctored exam consultancies in India and I never heard of any of them verifying interviewees for remote jobs.
Xcelerate 1y ago
So fly the person out for an in-person interview back like we did in the ancient year of 2019? This seems like a total non-problem to me.
thmsths 1y ago
Perhaps companies should go back to promoting their job openings at in person events? I remember a couple years ago when I went to a job faire, it was typical for recruiters to politely refuse your printed resume and instead suggest you apply through their online portal. Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach.
- ramesh31 1y ago
  >Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach. I have this theory in general that paper is going to make a huge comeback. We've passed the point now where there is no meaningful way to tell if something is AI unless it physically cannot be. Hand written paper and physical art is literally the only thing left that passes this.
  - zparky 1y ago
    Just you wait til I hook up a pen to my 3d printer (I know people have already done this)
- confidantlake 1y ago
  I suggested this to a coworker at my job and he responded as if I had slapped a baby. I guess it is like telling a hammer company that a screwdriver may be the better tool in some use cases.
Havoc 1y ago
Somewhat inevitable. There is internet everywhere and the salary differentials to the US are wild
duxup 1y ago
Hired someone recently. I sat in on several remote interviews and a couple ... I was suspicious. I didn't see any "AI" candidates, but I was suspicious about a few / if they were in fact who they said they were. The part I worry about is that maybe I was just too suspicious and some poor guy was playing it straight and I gave a thumbs down due to my suspicions.
krakotuoa 1y ago
it does happen and companies don't like to talk about it and most have existing actors still collecting paychecks. however, we have caught the whole gambit. A lot of applicants are good the problem is there is a subset that will go to extreme lengths to trick you. Competitors will do it, and even other governments will be depending on your industry. We talked to some recruiters recently and they essentially said atleast 1 step of the hiring process must be in person unless a valid reason can be made. i.e. single mother taking care of child going through a divorce backed up by a court record. One fun thing to do is stress test their GPU / CPU out during part of a coding exam. (Only do this for 99% confirmed cases) This can slow the deepfake software down so much that it starts looking messed up and obvious. Securing employee onboarding with KYE IAM is also critical. Most of these people don't put much effort on the 360 review of an applicant and verifications beyond video calls spot them early on. There are countless solutions to the problem so you need to be creative. These applicants think they are next level fakes, but a lot can be spotted a mile away.
raincom 1y ago
Pretty simple: ask these remote hires to come to the office for the first two weeks for onboarding. That will solve a lot of problems.
giantg2 1y ago
"Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions" Getting a taste of their own medicine after all those fake or evergreen postings. Feels shitty doesn't it? At least the people looking for hires still have a job to feed their families, unlike many on the job seeker side.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  Does it feel shitty? None of the CEOs interviewed in the article appear to be particularly distressed by it, and two of the three seem to be selling solutions to the problem. If anything, this ought to feel even worse for candidates - now I have to worry if Pindrop Security gave my Linkedin profile picture a 0.009 deepfake score.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    I would bet very little truly feels shitty for high comp CEOs. It probably feels a little shitty for the people actually doing the interviews.
pavel_lishin 1y ago
> When voice authentication startup Pindrop Security posted a recent job opening, one candidate stood out from hundreds of others. > The applicant, a Russian coder named Ivan, seemed to have all the right qualifications for the senior engineering role. When he was interviewed over video last month, however, Pindrop’s recruiter noticed that Ivan’s facial expressions were slightly out of sync with his words. > That’s because the candidate, whom the firm has since dubbed “Ivan X,” was a scammer using deepfake software and other generative AI tools in a bid to get hired by the tech company, said Pindrop CEO and co-founder Vijay Balasubramaniyan. Hm, let's read on. > As for “Ivan X,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan said the startup used a new video authentication program it created to confirm he was a deepfake fraud. Oh, I get it, it's an ad for Pindrop.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Anyone wanna put a bet down if Pindrop is using AI to detect AI? Now we can burn one rainforest down to generate deepfake content and burn another rainforest down to detect it and filter it so we don't need to look at it. Christ the future is stupid.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - Bootvis 1y ago
    The future will have two Dyson spheres in competition at every job interview.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    Sup dawg I heard you like AI.
    - Viliam1234 1y ago
whoomp12342 1y ago
this is why we can't have nice things.
foragerdev 1y ago
This is not new. This kind of things happening for long time especially for hunting high paying jobs in US. Now deep fake is just helping them a little. I joined tech industry in 2020, I did not know anything that how Pakistani/Indian/Bangladeshi companies get good bids from US clients until my friend joined industry next years. He joined a company who used to do this, and my friend help them clear interviews and get that company high paying jobs in US and he will be getting peanuts for the same job he got them probably 10k$/month. They will create fake profile of candidate of US citizen and someone during interview has to pretend to be him. Yeah of course before it has to be real human now, AI can be anyone. And I have been contacted many times to such kind of arrangement that the offered me that we will give you realistic fake US profile, you have to give interview, if you get hired, we will take some share of salary. And I denied, as I do not want to live with feeling of guilty of lying for earning more than I need where I live, I can live way better with what I make than my other fellow countrymen.
Animats 1y ago
Is it legal yet to require a Real ID when hiring in the US?
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  There's I-9. Or sign up for e-verify if you're that concerned.
T3uZr5Fg 1y ago
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junon 1y ago
A side effect of this that I've started to notice on a few of my repositories are fake accounts trying to bolster their perceived credibility when they are very obviously (terrible) AI accounts - down to their profile READMEs (on GitHub) that have obvious LLM output, pointing to links that don't exist, etc. and in some cases even LinkedIn profiles that are completely fabricated. I just had a PR opened that was a two character change, in Javascript, changing `if (!warned)` to `if (!== warned)`. They assured me, in an H1 no less, that they had tested everything and that it was fixing some problem, but didn't say what. What the hell is happening, and what are we supposed to collectively do about this? Or is this just some new norm we'll have to adapt to?
kkfx 1y ago
Hem I miss a point: how the scammer earn money doing so? Because such credible deepfakes (not much credible anyway) are damn expensive...
alganet 1y ago
Companies hiring for remote positions shot first by creating fake openings to game candidates for their interests, salary expectations and skills. Repeatedly. It's hilarious that the same technique is now being used against them and companies are angry and frustrated. Too bad they are not actually human to understand what those feelings mean.
GianFabien 1y ago
Simple fix: Hire onshore persons, interview in person. Pay a living salary.
Jackosas 1y ago
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naomitakahash90 1y ago
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hulitu 1y ago
> Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions The empire strikes back. Until now, the job market, was flooded with false vacancies.
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182 points by arizen 1y ago

jacknews 1y ago

Are they applying to all the fake jobs?

ceejayoz 1y ago
Yeah, this seems like a fair turnaround for the folks who've been wasting applicants' time for decades.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  > ...seems like a fair turnaround for... Except the "them" who've been wasting applicants' time for decades is not the same as the "them" who are facing the flood of fake job seekers. It's generally preferable that "justice" treats innocent parties and guilty parties quite differently.
  - rightbyte 1y ago
    I can't stress this enough. There seem to be a great desire among some to punnish totally uninvolved people for some sort of systematic problem. Imagine being a prince from Nigeria ...
  - hackable_sand 1y ago
    Idk dude. The schadenfreude is real. If a company wants to self-immolate to chase shadows, I will happily watch.
- throwaway647837 1y ago
  Is it a fair turnaround for the honest folks just trying to get a job the old fashioned way, whose resumes will get drowned in the sea of AI trash?
  - vlod 1y ago
    Pretty much so. Next to impossible to actually apply to a job. I'm very experienced, live in the US and a friendly chap who interviews well, but because of everyone is using AI (applicants, recruiters, employers), it's next to impossible to get a reply to any posting or get trough to a 'human'.
angra_mainyu 1y ago
AI interviewer interviewing AI interviewee - welcome to 2025

gibbitz 1y ago

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

codegladiator 1y ago
> putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured reality is way more messy and worse. There are multiple actors involved in each part. Eg 2-3 "actors" for visual screen are ready for each call, 2-4 "audio" knowledge only experts on the call, 1 dedicated speaker, 1 person coordinating answers from audio folks to actor folks. they are even ready for once in a while visit to offices in us, so they have actors there on the field as well ready to attend calls (probably 1 to 1 mapping after first visit) and the work assigned is assigned to a completely different set of people, not involved in any of above. those folks and these folks dont interact. i have worked part time as one of the "audio" person in above interviews. also involved on work side. ama.
- 1y ago

derelicta 1y ago

That sure won't make it easier to apply for full remote jobs...

s3p 1y ago

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

Loudergood 1y ago
Most? Maybe for large companies. I work with a lot of SMBs and half of them are happy to use the gateway built into their cable modem, and install no additional security whatsoever. While running OSs that are beyond end of life.
- throwanem 1y ago
  Ever thus. The first programming job I had after high school, I got in part by pointing out that I hadn't previously seen Windows XP Pro machines with publicly routable IPv4 addresses, and suggesting one reason for their persistent slowness might be the effect of putting unfirewalled XP machines on the public Internet - a very bad idea, even in 2004.
not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
[flagged]

jeswin 1y ago

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

skeeter2020 1y ago
HN doesn't seem like a very lucrative pool for scams like this one. You don't see many meh corporate development jobs posted here, which are they ones you can fake for months or years. Hard to do that when you're working daily with the founder or a smaller team.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  You give way too much credit to the types of companies that get YC funding. I’ve seen a lot of meh corporate jobs posted here with corp dev type wages.
  - teqsun 1y ago
    What would you call "corp dev type wages"?
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      Starting salaries around $70-$80K, senior salaries around $140K-$160K and “architects” around $175K. This is in the Atlanta market where I use to live before I started working remotely and moved. I got this email from a recruiter there. It’s about the same in most major non west coast markets (Starting on page 26) https://motionrecruitment.com/hubfs/TSG-25/Atlanta-IT-Salary-Guide-2025.pdf https://motionrecruitment.com/hubfs/TSG-25/Atlanta-IT-Salary... Compare that to any of the BigTech or adjacent companies where entry level developers are getting return offers from their internships of $150K-$175K.

Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago

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

specialp 1y ago

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

sneak 1y ago
Why do you call it fraud? It's not fraudulent.
hackable_sand 1y ago
If it's not illegal then why are you using words like "fraud" and "steal"?
- specialp 1y ago
  Because it is the technical definition of the words and that is exactly what it is. Something not being illegal does not mean that it isn't fraud or stealing. Misrepresenting your availability and willfully trying to cover that is is fraud. Taking someone's money while fraudulently not working for it is stealing. I know overemployment people will rationalize it some other way but it doesn't change that.
  - sneak 1y ago
    If those so "overemployed" (that is to say, working multiple jobs, a normal and common thing to do in society) were not working for their employer, they would be dismissed quickly. Nobody's stealing anything in these situations.

InDubioProRubio 1y ago

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

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago

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

vlod 1y ago
Works both ways. How many time have devs wasted their time where it says 'competitive salary' (which they don't want to reveal) but in fact it's nowhere close. Or a job description which has X, but X is a very small subset but in fact its a mostly legacy system using Y. Want to pay me for my time?
confidantlake 1y ago
Great, now we get 100x more fake jobs flooding the internet.

lenerdenator 1y ago

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

techjamie 1y ago
The irony isn't lost on me how employers will post ghost positions, and use automation to sort through applications faster. While at the same time condemning automation from the applicant side, even if the automation is used in good faith.

josefritzishere 1y ago

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

riskable 1y ago

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

wpietri 1y ago
So one, I don't think you know what the word "impostor" means. If somebody faked your wife's identity, I think you could be reasonably upset even if she could "do the job" adequately, and it would be weird indeed to say she wasn't an impostor. But two, are you serious with "If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired"? I think the most charitable assumption I could make is that you must not have been in the working world long. There are plenty of places that are bad noticing and getting rid of underperformers, even when everybody involved is well meaning. If somebody is actively running it as a scam, it could be hard indeed to detect. And really, they don't have to evade detection forever. Even a few months of paycheck may be more than enough for them to cover the costs of getting the jobs.

toss1 1y ago

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

FireBeyond 1y ago
No way in hell am I consenting to "install a location tracking device" and "send us proof of all travel plans". "A bit of light surveillance" my ass.
- toss1 1y ago
  Fine. You are free to obfuscate and/or lie about your identity and location, and they are free to hire or not hire you. Who said anything about install? They give you a company phone. And you really think it is unreasonable for a person/company paying you money to do a task to know where on the planet you are located, emergency contacts, etc.? What happens when you get hit by a bus in Bangkok or have a scuba incident in Bali and are in the hospital for a week or worse? You just go dark and they have no way to send aid or even get status on the work you are now suddenly not doing, or obtain the current files so someone else can make progress? Of course there are many inconsequential gigs/jobs for which it doesn't matter if you disappear, or lie about your identity or location, or are a North Korean spy trying to destroy the company, and you're welcome to work for those. But I'm 100% in favor of remote work, and I would not remotely consider hiring someone for any consequential project or position without knowing they are who they say they are and they are where they say they are located. And from a Corporate and National Security perspective, while I consider Return To Office largely outrageous, it seems quite reasonable for simple physical security measures to verify an employee is who and where they say they are. Even more so considering the massive amounts of both nation-state-level corporate espionage and remote work fraud going on.

techjamie 1y ago

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

sneak 1y ago
"foreign names"? Applying to a restaurant?
- techjamie 1y ago
  I should probably specify that the restaurant is in a low population area where everybody pretty much knows everyone else. And the botted applications came from people that lived nowhere near there, and were from a demographic that was all but absent from the area. Nobody is moving across the nation to a town in the middle of nowhere to make $10/hr.
  - confidantlake 1y ago
    Why is he posting on indeed instead of just posting a sign in the window or just putting the word out if "everyone knows everyone"? Especially for a $10/hr restaurant job?

throwanem 1y ago

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

mmierz 1y ago

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

masfuerte 1y ago
I agree, but as a non-American I wouldn't want to travel to America for anything work-related at the moment without a business visa, and the hassle of getting one would make hiring foreign workers much more of a chore.
aitchnyu 1y ago
So many visa and proctored exam consultancies in India and I never heard of any of them verifying interviewees for remote jobs.

Xcelerate 1y ago

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

thmsths 1y ago

Perhaps companies should go back to promoting their job openings at in person events? I remember a couple years ago when I went to a job faire, it was typical for recruiters to politely refuse your printed resume and instead suggest you apply through their online portal. Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach.

ramesh31 1y ago
>Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach. I have this theory in general that paper is going to make a huge comeback. We've passed the point now where there is no meaningful way to tell if something is AI unless it physically cannot be. Hand written paper and physical art is literally the only thing left that passes this.
- zparky 1y ago
  Just you wait til I hook up a pen to my 3d printer (I know people have already done this)
confidantlake 1y ago
I suggested this to a coworker at my job and he responded as if I had slapped a baby. I guess it is like telling a hammer company that a screwdriver may be the better tool in some use cases.

Havoc 1y ago

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

duxup 1y ago

Hired someone recently. I sat in on several remote interviews and a couple ... I was suspicious. I didn't see any "AI" candidates, but I was suspicious about a few / if they were in fact who they said they were. The part I worry about is that maybe I was just too suspicious and some poor guy was playing it straight and I gave a thumbs down due to my suspicions.

krakotuoa 1y ago

it does happen and companies don't like to talk about it and most have existing actors still collecting paychecks. however, we have caught the whole gambit. A lot of applicants are good the problem is there is a subset that will go to extreme lengths to trick you. Competitors will do it, and even other governments will be depending on your industry. We talked to some recruiters recently and they essentially said atleast 1 step of the hiring process must be in person unless a valid reason can be made. i.e. single mother taking care of child going through a divorce backed up by a court record. One fun thing to do is stress test their GPU / CPU out during part of a coding exam. (Only do this for 99% confirmed cases) This can slow the deepfake software down so much that it starts looking messed up and obvious. Securing employee onboarding with KYE IAM is also critical. Most of these people don't put much effort on the 360 review of an applicant and verifications beyond video calls spot them early on. There are countless solutions to the problem so you need to be creative. These applicants think they are next level fakes, but a lot can be spotted a mile away.

raincom 1y ago

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

giantg2 1y ago

"Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions" Getting a taste of their own medicine after all those fake or evergreen postings. Feels shitty doesn't it? At least the people looking for hires still have a job to feed their families, unlike many on the job seeker side.

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
Does it feel shitty? None of the CEOs interviewed in the article appear to be particularly distressed by it, and two of the three seem to be selling solutions to the problem. If anything, this ought to feel even worse for candidates - now I have to worry if Pindrop Security gave my Linkedin profile picture a 0.009 deepfake score.
- giantg2 1y ago
  I would bet very little truly feels shitty for high comp CEOs. It probably feels a little shitty for the people actually doing the interviews.

pavel_lishin 1y ago

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

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Anyone wanna put a bet down if Pindrop is using AI to detect AI? Now we can burn one rainforest down to generate deepfake content and burn another rainforest down to detect it and filter it so we don't need to look at it. Christ the future is stupid.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  [flagged]
- Bootvis 1y ago
  The future will have two Dyson spheres in competition at every job interview.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  Sup dawg I heard you like AI.
  - Viliam1234 1y ago

whoomp12342 1y ago

this is why we can't have nice things.

foragerdev 1y ago

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

Animats 1y ago

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

FireBeyond 1y ago
There's I-9. Or sign up for e-verify if you're that concerned.

T3uZr5Fg 1y ago

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junon 1y ago

A side effect of this that I've started to notice on a few of my repositories are fake accounts trying to bolster their perceived credibility when they are very obviously (terrible) AI accounts - down to their profile READMEs (on GitHub) that have obvious LLM output, pointing to links that don't exist, etc. and in some cases even LinkedIn profiles that are completely fabricated. I just had a PR opened that was a two character change, in Javascript, changing `if (!warned)` to `if (!== warned)`. They assured me, in an H1 no less, that they had tested everything and that it was fixing some problem, but didn't say what. What the hell is happening, and what are we supposed to collectively do about this? Or is this just some new norm we'll have to adapt to?

kkfx 1y ago

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

alganet 1y ago

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

GianFabien 1y ago

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

Jackosas 1y ago

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naomitakahash90 1y ago

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hulitu 1y ago

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

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