[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
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Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?
In the past month we've seen a dramatic, seemingly coordinated,
increase in engineering applicants whose resumes and backgrounds
appear qualified, but who refuse to use their cameras during Zoom
interviews and who often can't answer specific questions about
their backgrounds. We've wasted a significant amount of time on
comms and interviews with over a dozen of these candidates. Anyone
else experiencing anything similar?
Author : lgsilver
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-08-31 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
| ericol wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| Been happening for a decade, it ebbs and flows.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| xupybd wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| Um we can still have nice things if people stop being naive.
| It's not hard to verify someone actually exists... there are
| ways.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| ghoward wrote:
| Holy cow, _you_ can 't get a job? What?!
|
| That makes me feel better about not being able to.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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?"
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah, I know. I'm just venting really.
| gedy wrote:
| 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.
| xupybd wrote:
| 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.
| Kinnard wrote:
| Don't hire remotely. Fly them out. Like a pre-COVID YC Interview.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| 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.
| rabuse wrote:
| Just ask them to turn their heads all the way around. Should
| defeat any of that, lol.
| xwdv wrote:
| In theory the only thing that matters is the results, not if
| they actually exist.
| drdec wrote:
| 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.
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I'm certainly curious. In a role that deals with large money
| movement.
| donsupreme wrote:
| what exactly is the endgame?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Once they make it into an organization, they often do very
| well.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Pretty much every new grad is faking it until they make it.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| quadcore wrote:
| 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.
| dexwiz wrote:
| > 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?
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| this entirely relies on your own interpretation of respect.
| respecting nature sometimes means staying the fuck away
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| 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!
| dahfizz wrote:
| 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.
| quadcore wrote:
| 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 can
| go undetected for decades) and more importantly: pain is
| pleasure (not always physically). That last bit is the
| endgame but you and me dont have that so its very difficult
| to register therefore to comprehend.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Paradox of tolerance.
| conductr wrote:
| Ironically, this is similar to how regular people think of
| "hackers"
| tschwimmer wrote:
| 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.
|
| or
|
| 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).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| With b), they are actually likely to be the real thing; just
| treacherous.
| version_five wrote:
| 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
| csunbird wrote:
| 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.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| 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.
| guhcampos wrote:
| 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)
| itg wrote:
| 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.
| treeman79 wrote:
| 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.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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.
| vsareto wrote:
| overemployed.com
|
| Some of it's probably just creative writing or people
| bullshitting on the internet though.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| 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
| bb88 wrote:
| 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.
| yardie wrote:
| > 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| Not if you're charging hourly, it's not. Then it's time
| fraud.
|
| It's just like a lawyer's billable hours.
| gabereiser wrote:
| only if you charge hourly to two companies at the same
| time. Contractors can work multiple contracts, thats the
| name of the game.
| bb88 wrote:
| That's exactly what he did -- charge two companies for 1
| hour worked.
| claytonjy wrote:
| > 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?
| vsareto wrote:
| 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.
| roey2009 wrote:
| He probably used the same GitHub for both their repos. I
| don't see how otherwise it could be connected. Not so
| bright.
| bb88 wrote:
| His github username was easily found from his linkedin
| account.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| 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.
| Aperocky wrote:
| You guys conduct interviews without even seeing the face of
| candidates?
| dom96 wrote:
| 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?
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| pridkett wrote:
| 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.
| ByersReason wrote:
| Yes, I had a candidate turn up for a physical interview who
| clearly was not the person on the phone screen.
| atrettel wrote:
| The FBI and other US federal agencies have attributed similar
| tactics to North Koreans looking to infiltrate particular
| industries [1-3].
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korean-crypto-job-
| cand...
|
| [2]
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/fbi_korea_freelancers...
|
| [3] https://www.wired.com/story/north-korean-it-scammer-alert/
| bb88 wrote:
| This shit has been going on for the last 5 years or more. I've
| seen it with non-asian candidates.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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)
| aliqot wrote:
| Russia is partly asia as well.
| samstave wrote:
| I may have just experienced identity theft by an indian company
| claming to hire me.
|
| I am convinced of it now.
| jmcgough wrote:
| 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.
| plebianRube wrote:
| 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.
| 752963e64 wrote:
| s1k3s wrote:
| 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.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Has that worked? Have you got any offers doing that?
| s1k3s wrote:
| 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| 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. I don't do
| resumes either, but that isn't a religious objection, I just
| don't find them useful.
| saddist0 wrote:
| 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.
| s1k3s wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| berkserbet wrote:
| 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!
| s1k3s wrote:
| 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.
| giobox wrote:
| 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/
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| They sometimes literally have a different person do the
| interview than shows up in person; no interview process catches
| that.
| slt2021 wrote:
| how about ID check? (if interview is conducted onsite in the
| office)
| kube-system wrote:
| My understanding is that the scams usually target hiring
| processes that are all remote, often the applicants are
| from far away.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| rabuse wrote:
| 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.
| shitlord wrote:
| 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.
| dijondreams wrote:
| 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?
| macksd wrote:
| 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.
| erdos4d wrote:
| 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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| EDIT delete me
| robertlagrant wrote:
| So don't do it at scale. Just to jobs you're applying to.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| 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.
| janoc wrote:
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| askafriend wrote:
| Simple - just auto-reject anyone who refuses to use a camera or
| answer specifics.
| discodave wrote:
| 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.
| askafriend wrote:
| True, but it costs you less if you just do it from minute 1
| instead of letting them go through the process.
| Aperocky wrote:
| This is the reason why employee recommendation have far
| higher success rate.
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