Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

It's a problem here too. Even if they use their camera, it doesn't mean they don't have someone feeding them answers to questions. Phone interviews are even more sketchy since the person who may be answering the questions is a completely different person who shows up on day 1.

We had one person we hired as a contractor, but then her voice changed on the phone, and started calling people by their last names in chat. It looked like it was someone that subcontracted another who then quit, and the first was trying to hold onto the contract as long as possible.

Another answered complex questions during the interview, but after the start they knew nothing.

A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time. Unfortunately while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second. He was shown the door that day.

Tangentially, another contractor "lost" two macbooks assigned to him. Apparently right after travelling to Colorado after they legalized weed.

> A third contractor I knew was trying to do two jobs at the same time.

I mean this literally how contractors work. Unless they were taking your IP and using it for another company I don’t see the issue.

Not if you're charging hourly, it's not. Then it's time fraud.

It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.

only if you charge hourly to two companies at the same time. Contractors can work multiple contracts, thats the name of the game.

That's exactly what he did -- charge two companies for 1 hour worked.

Even if he wasn't, he was a contractor, and checking code while being on site for another company was sus. Employment is "at will" in the US for the most part.

> while he was supposed to be working for one company he was making public github commits for the second

If you're setting their hours, doesn't that make them an employee rather than a contractor, legally speaking?

Maybe it's not a real contractor. I had one job where I was a "contractor", I had set hours, got paid hourly, received a w2. It seemed like just an excuse to be cheap and not provide benefits.

You can be on a W2, but as soon as the contract ends, your employment ends since you're "at will" in the US.

Usually the W2 is provided through an agency and you're getting a paycheck from them while the agency is billing the company for hours at a negotiated rate, often much higher than you're being paid.

May have billed a specific time span, but also had commits during that span. Dunno how they proved the github account belonged to the contractor though unless they just admitted to it or used the company email to register.

> Dunno how they proved

people who no longer trust you and don't want to work with you any more generally don't have to prove it.

He probably used the same GitHub for both their repos. I don't see how otherwise it could be connected. Not so bright.

His github username was easily found from his linkedin account.

This shit has been going on for the last 5 years or more. I've seen it with non-asian candidates.

China employs non-Chinese to track and interfere with dissidents and critics of China in the US https://news.artnet.com/art-world/us-blames-china-operatives...

and of course, plenty of Russians and Iranians are non-Asian (in appearance, Persia is in Asia of course)

Yes. In a fairly large public company I worked at, I remember a DBA on contract got fired because he knew absolutely nothing.

But only a few weeks later he was back, in the same building, but using a different name on a different floor working as a Senior Software Architect.

He got caught because someone in the DB department recognized him, called him by his old name and they pretended they never new him.

About 5 years ago at a previous company we had someone who interviewed well, and then the person who showed up was totally not the same quality person we had talked to previously. I guess the placement strategy at some low quality placement agencies is to just put someone good on the interview and hope the hiring company doesn't notice.

I haven't seen it recently, but I am now in a position where we have good recruiters who filter people before I ever see them.

I had this happen to me at a former large employer. I insisted on removing the agency from our list of approved agencies and was told that if we did that to every agency that did that sort of fraud then we’d have no agencies in our budget range.

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.

Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job description fraud?

The job market is a market. Nobody owes you anything. In most job fields the buyer has the leverage over the seller so the buyers will go out of their way to press that leverage (low pay, low benefits, impossible demands etc). It just happens that in a few fields the seller has the advantage so they're doing the same thing to you. My point is you have to accept it and move on, because things like this happen all the time and won't ever stop.

Once worked at a 3rd party coding interview company as an interviewer, and we had a bunch of grad students from a college who were all clearly cheating. They solved the problem from the top of the page down (rather than organically, as someone would when doing actual programming) in a very specific way.

The company didn't want to disqualify those candidates, since we couldn't prove cheating, but it was pretty fascinating to witness.

Fortunately our company gives us the option to reject a candidate if we feel they are cheating and can provide an explanation. Once had a candidate solve a problem extremely quickly but they could not explain how they solved it all. I then made a small modification to the problem which wouldn't have changed the solution much and they were completely lost.

I feel that most avid readers of the green book would behave like that. If you consider that cheating its probably better to find another interview method.

(I do hate code interviews)

What happens to the ones who don’t cheat? If there is a curve of some sort they can be screwed even if they are well qualified.

Probably, but small instances of cheating aren't going to push the curve all that much. We were mostly functioning as a first layer as well, so if the likely cheaters couldn't perform, they'd still get filtered out during the companies' onsites. At least that was the rationale.

Ug... as someone that one day would like to work remote this is infuriating.

Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.

> Anyone who is doing this, you're destroying trust and making life hard for the rest of us.

Sadly, they don't care.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Um we can still have nice things if people stop being naive. It’s not hard to verify someone actually exists… there are ways.

The nice thing would be having a basic level of trust that the person you're interviewing is an actual person. If all job interviews need to start off with a CAPTCHA we'll be in a bad place.

I imagine these shell-game interview tricks work really well at large companies where the HR screen is considered to be perfect and thus managers rejecting numerous candidates at the interview layer will be penalized in some manner. "Look, Polly on the Cloud-X-AI team accepted 80% of applicants that reached the interview phase - why is your team accepting just 20%? Is this a culture fit issue that we'll need to intervene on?"

I know. It was a joke.

I'm old, and have seen plenty of rejection, even though I'm "the real deal." But that kind of behavior has been used as an excuse for ignoring me. The icing on the cake, was when I was told that "I probably faked" my portfolio.

At that point, I realized that I am radioactive, and might as well just give up.

Holy cow, you can't get a job? What?!

That makes me feel better about not being able to.

I'm not sure if it's just "remote" or also aiming for cheap overseas contractors.

As a senior remote US employee I don't see how any of the companies I interviewed with would even allow past screening not turning on camera or other tricks like this.

As a New Zealander, unfortunately, I fall into the category of cheap overseas contractor. With our weak dollar working for a US company is a good way to earn above average. We're still much more expensive than some of the cheaper countries. In fact we're currently working with a Vietnamese contractor. He is very good and much cheaper than a local hire.

Not only have I seen this several times, I've also encountered multiple instances of "over-employed" software engineers, who are doing 2-3 full time salaried positions from home, at the same time. This is surprisingly easy to get away with unnoticed in the US tax system, as you get a separate W2 from each employer. It's genuinely a lot more difficult to do this in some other countries. There's even this service now offered to let employers try to catch this:

> https://theworknumber.com/

It used to happen alot with contract bodyshops, even in person.

Usually you’d get weird looking resumes from someone based out of New Jersey or Arizona. In most cases the employees were Indian and would phone screen well. When the person landed, usually they were green staff who would basically send their work back to a more senior person or team who would do the work elsewhere overnight.

With remote, there’s definitely more fraud in this space, from people lying about where they are, stealing information and just grifting.

Simple - just auto-reject anyone who refuses to use a camera or answer specifics.

That still costs you (the employer) money. It's like a DoS attack for your hiring system.

E.g. a nefarious actor could harm a competitor by overwhelming them with fake applicants that it takes time to sift through.

True, but it costs you less if you just do it from minute 1 instead of letting them go through the process.

This is the reason why employee recommendation have far higher success rate.

Someone I know hired an experienced programmer from Indian who interviewed well. When his first day started, he seemed extremely junior - needed basic things explained to him like command line usage. One of the people who interviewed him saw him on camera and told the EM he was pretty sure it was a different guy. The EM confronted him and he admitted it, so they let him go.

Makes me wonder what % of the time this actually works and no one is willing to fire them, or if it's just worth the salary of collecting a month of pay before you're found out.

This is exactly why the technical interview process is what it is. No point wasting time asking about backgrounds and describing past projects (all of it can be easily faked). Make them write code in front of you live as part of the screening round.

The coding portion is the easiest to cheat on. I know because I interviewed someone who did cheat. She shared her screen with someone else and had someone talking her through the interview. Somehow the audio feeds crossed, and I heard the guy speaking.

The person on the other end is probably just googling keywords from whatever question you ask. You can throw them off by asking followup questions or adding new constraints.

They sometimes literally have a different person do the interview than shows up in person; no interview process catches that.

how about ID check? (if interview is conducted onsite in the office)

My understanding is that the scams usually target hiring processes that are all remote, often the applicants are from far away.

I don't like making people write code live. Some really good coders just don't work well with people looking over their shoulder.

I prefer giving people a take-home with an original problem to solve. Then, follow that up with a live call where you ask them some questions about it.

Yep, that's me. I feel like an experiment when people are watching what I'm doing, even if it's something as mundane as browsing the web.

We had an issue with a candidate who was attempting to use our access to processing networks to facilitate financial crime. It was a coordinated state actor tactic.

Happy to share more info with founders over email or IM; I don’t want to publicly draw the ire of those who attempted this.

I’m certainly curious. In a role that deals with large money movement.

Slightly tangential, but I wonder how long before you have people using deepfakes to look and sound like someone else on camera to perpetrate this kind of fraud. It seems like all of the pieces are mostly there.

Just ask them to turn their heads all the way around. Should defeat any of that, lol.

In theory the only thing that matters is the results, not if they actually exist.

The point of the deep fake is to let one person interview while another shows up for the job and the employer is none the wiser. Presumably the person who does up is significantly less qualified.

This sounds like fraud, and possibly organized crime.

I don't know whether an AG's office would be interested in hearing about it, but you could try calling.

Curious where the candidates are being sourced from - my hunch is that whatever source they're coming from is suddenly being exploited by such people for some reason. I've seen a general increase over the last 1-2 years (so, post-COVID) of candidates who exhibit similar behavior, but it hasn't been the majority of the candidates. I've just chalked it up to remote work being more normal and some people actually being able to get away with this for some time: Googling their way into a few months of employment before being found out for good.

We created https://www.freeflow.dev because of how prevalent this issue is in the web3 space. Our vetting includes a video call and identity check with each candidate!

It seems like good interview questions (for all candidates) could be "how should we stop interview and employment fraud, what are your ideas?" You want candidates who are clever at analyzing a new problem, and it puts the issue on the table in a cooperative way.

Yup am seeing this weekly now when hiring. Pretty sure these are just companies who are employing cheap foreign labor and acquiring higher paying American jobs. Wage arbitrage?

You hear these stories so much but what I don't get is how these people get past the HireRight checks, do the companies this happens to just not use HireRight?

I'm not saying this isn't happening, but I want to mention that I often refuse to do stuff that my interviewers ask me to. Reasons being any of: I consider it useless for the evaluation, I consider it doesn't correctly asses my expertise, I consider it would put me in a bad situation etc. Of course, I can do all this because the market allows me to do it.

Isn't facial expression and your communication skills considered a part of your "expertise"?

I personally prefer asking the person to open the camera or reschedule to a later date if they can't.

I personally agree which is why I also join every interview with my camera on. Objectively though you have to consider that the job market is a MARKET, and if the seller (candidate) considers they can do just fine without the camera (or anything else really) then you have to accept that fact and move on to another candidate if you can or just go forward with them without camera. Nobody owes anything to anyone here.

Worked for me with a polite "I appreciate it but no thank you". I just said I don't take photos or appear on camera. It didn't stop me from being interviewed or hired.

None. I'm not using it to get more offers, I'm using it to save my time by skipping stuff I don't want to do.

You guys conduct interviews without even seeing the face of candidates?

I've always wondered how those recruiting studies where they send out a lot of fake resumes that differ only on one attribute play out for the other side. That was my first thought, but your experience might also be something different.

Once had a Ph.D. who wasn't until somebody checked up and referred the issue to HR who did the background check. This was using an old-school in person interviewing method.

Once I had a love and it was a gas Soon turned out had a heart of glass Seemed like the real thing, only to find Mucho mistrust, love's gone behind

Yes, I had a candidate turn up for a physical interview who clearly was not the person on the phone screen.

I have been involved in hiring for years. I saw this happen for the first time a month ago. It makes me wonder if some Discord/Slack/Telegram group has recently been organized around this dubious "life hack" strategy.

overemployed.com

Some of it's probably just creative writing or people bullshitting on the internet though.

Don't hire remotely. Fly them out. Like a pre-COVID YC Interview.

I may have just experienced identity theft by an indian company claming to hire me.

I am convinced of it now.

This sounds like what I wanted to do once I realized how insanely easy remote work was. I do my wife's code for her dev job and it honestly works out to like 2 hours a week for me. She spends maybe 10 hours in meetings, so it totally makes sense to put 3 or 4 front people in positions to handle the meetings and just funnel the work back to me. Sounds like they are doing a bait and switch strategy though. You should just give them a coding test and see if they actually have a senior dev behind these guys. If so, quit pestering the front person who takes your order and be happy with the finished product.

I imagine either:

a) Get hired, collect a paycheck or two while doing the absolute bare minimum (filling out onboarding forms, etc - no real work) and then move on to the next victim company.

b) Get hired with the goal of getting access to improperly secured company or user data.

I imagine a) is vastly more common than b).

It could also be to get the job. People often feel entitled but believe they are disadvantaged by some factor outside their control and use that to justify cheating, believing they will be able to do the job once they get there. Another version of this is people who apply for a job and actually are just posers who can't code at all. In both cases the employer failed to weed them out, even if the first version is a more overt kind of cheating, the outcome isn't much different than the second version

But, the thing is, the companies are putting down very sophisticated hiring methods that are not relevant to the job itself at all (e.g. hiring someone that can write quicksort in 30 minutes).

I presume, after passing the gatekeepers, most of the people can hold and do the job required from them at bare minimum. The fakers who can not code at all will be found, but someone with an average amount of talent should be able to collect the fat paycheck for several years, as most of the jobs do not require much anyways.

With b), they are actually likely to be the real thing; just treacherous.

Good question. As an educational note, please be careful and tell your kids some - unbalanced - people have no other endgame than to annoy you and play with your emotions. To destroy you mentally (sometimes physically as well). Thats their kick. Pretty sure this applies in this case as well. Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.

> Dont get me wrong, they are humans and deserve respect.

But why? I feel like we devalue true respect by repeating phrases like this. I'm not saying they deserve to be abused, but why do they deserve respect for solely existing?

You think you are not like them because of your choices when it's actually because of sheer luck. I respect them for carrying such a shitty poker hand their whole life.

Anyway, you still gota defend yourself like they are monsters. Tell your kids: they are masterful liers and manipulators, they look normal, they have a cover (they have jobs and all, they can go undetected for decades) and more importantly: pain is pleasure (not always physically but mentally as well). That last bit is the endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult to register therefore to comprehend.

If we don't have some base level of respect for people just because they're people ("for solely existing") then we can justify treating marginalized people even worse than we already are. Some of them already have it pretty bad! Seems evil!

This goes back to OPs point about devaluing the concept of respect.

I'm generally polite to stangers I meet. Not because I respect them (how could I? I don't know them), but because it's morally good to behave decently.

By conflating respect with basic manners/decency, you really devalue what it means to deserve respect and to be respected.

this entirely relies on your own interpretation of respect. respecting nature sometimes means staying the fuck away

Ironically, this is similar to how regular people think of "hackers"

There are a lot of people who believe they can fake it until they make it, and they also often think that everyone fakes it until they make it, as well. That's the end game, doing whatever it takes until they make it.

Pretty much every new grad is faking it until they make it.

Once they make it into an organization, they often do very well.

If they get the person in the door (hired) a chunk of their paycheck goes to the referring agency. And a month employed might be a year's salary back home.

You do realize that at some point you will actually need to go to the company your are interviewing with in person and to provide a lot more personal information than just a blurry mugshot from a Zoom call in order to be able to be employed and collect a salary??

Nobody collects "critical PII" using job interviews, no company has time for such nonsense. The companies that do collect such information don't do it using job interviews, there are much easier and less time and resource consuming ways of doing that.

And re deep fake/blackmail - why would a company you are applying to hoping to score a job and hiding your face from want to blackmail you?

Sorry but that's utter paranoia and bullshit.

> You do realize that at some point you will actually need to go to the company your are interviewing with in person and to provide a lot more personal information than just a blurry mugshot from a Zoom call in order to be able to be employed and collect a salary?

HR these days can be done online -- sign the forms and post a picture of your identification to website that HR controls. 100% remote is a thing these days.

So don't do it at scale. Just to jobs you're applying to.

you hint at the nuance involved. I did say by general rule. and there are many cases where one does not apply but rather a remote actor reaches out, ostensibly a hiring company.