[HN Gopher] Someone is pretending to be me
___________________________________________________________________
Someone is pretending to be me
Author : iBotPeaches
Score : 2091 points
Date : 2022-09-27 15:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (connortumbleson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (connortumbleson.com)
| specialist wrote:
| At some point people will start to figure out that having
| authenticated online personas would be useful.
|
| Just like in the real world.
|
| Authenticated and anonymous are not mutually exclusive. We need a
| mix.
|
| Just like in the real world.
| iBotPeaches wrote:
| I submitted my own blog here, but then my intentionally
| configured HN timeouts locked me out. I was wondering why my
| little Linode was dying.
|
| Yeah this was an incredibly odd and creepy experience that I
| continue to investigate here and there. I really appreciate the
| interviewer for letting me stay on and confront the imposter.
| hmm-interesting wrote:
| Username seems familiar. I have spent a lot time with your
| apktool, few years ago. For the first time, I saw your real
| name and photo. Thank you for this amazing tool.
| archon810 wrote:
| That's exactly how I know Connor too. Wild to see him at the
| top of HN with this story.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The Darknet Diaries guy will probably want to interview you
| after this.
| ralphael wrote:
| highly recommend that podcast too!
| macintux wrote:
| I could sure use a flowchart to follow this story. Baffling level
| of fraud.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| This is the type of arbitrage that happens when developers have
| similar technical skills but not similar interviewing skills.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| If the other thread [1] is to be believed there is no
| guarantee that the developers on the other side has similar
| skills. No need to dig up arbitrage when it could simply be a
| scam.
|
| Even the person they hired here to pretend to be Connor said
| himself that's he's just a junior that would pretend to be a
| senior. Maybe the idea is simply to get a well-paid job, work
| a couple months, get fired (maybe even with a generous
| severance), and repeat.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996457
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Yeah it could be "just" a scam though the arbitrage is
| really a scam too. The other thread's doesn't make sense
| because the dev is still trying to work despite being
| immediately id'ed as a different person on zoom. This scam
| only makes sense to me to be doing something like stealing
| the signing bonus but actually trying to be a dev is
| curiously naive or stupid.
| lazide wrote:
| If the scammers found a naive patsy to be the 'employee'
| and used an experienced dev to do the interview, it makes
| sense.
|
| At many companies, they wouldn't necessarily notice the
| difference right away too, if someone was pretending to
| work. Management is often overloaded or checked out.
| Depending on ethnicity, they might also be unwilling to
| bring up the issue.
|
| For example, if the patsy sticks with it, who is going to
| call the bluff - especially if no one took a picture?
|
| They could claim the manager was being racist by not
| being able to recognize them or something. If someone IS
| not great at recognizing/telling apart, say, Indians, it
| could sow doubt that would make it harder to address. And
| that is a lot of people in the US.
|
| The longer the delay, and the more legal buttons get
| pushed, the more the company pays out before the scam is
| over, and the more lucrative it is.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Pay out to whom? Surely the employment paperwork, the pay
| checks, the direct deposit forms would have to also be
| under the assumed name?
| lazide wrote:
| It's not hard to find local cut-outs in most areas. In
| most cases, those folks are also patsies.
|
| Another, different party who cashes checks written to
| their name in exchange for a cut, for example.
|
| As an example, there is still the old in the tooth
| craigslist 'oops, I sent too large a cashiers check, can
| you send me the extra?' scam, which is an even more
| obvious ripoff, and people fall for that all the time.
|
| If approached by law enforcement, their story would
| likely be they were working for X (different) company as
| an assistant or in finance, etc. The other company of
| course will be in a different state, country, or
| whatever, or maybe not actually exist, depending on the
| logistics of the money movement.
|
| The scammers could easily have 10-20 different paychecks
| going to one person without anyone being the wiser - at
| least until the IRS got the W-2s or the cut-out started
| thinking about the long term consequences.
|
| Scammers are used to a lot of churn with stuff like this,
| it's why these scams are hardish to run and aren't even
| more lucrative. Think breaking bad and 'Walt trying to
| ACTUALLY make money selling meth'. Lots of surprise
| expenses, people going sideways on you, competition you
| didn't expect, paranoia, logistics difficulties.
|
| That's assuming they aren't just forging/stealing SSNs or
| identities and using some kind of front somewhere, like
| payday check cashing places willing to look the other
| way, or whatever.
|
| There are plenty of folks running bad check scams or the
| like already, and they don't have the benefit of checks
| that will actually cash (all the time), like a big
| companies payroll check.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I wasn't even thinking about the fact that it leaves a
| paper trail. I was just thinking about the fact that the
| company who ostensibly hired "John Doe" is being given
| payment details for "Jack Frost".
| lazide wrote:
| It wouldn't be hard to have it be John Doe all the way
| through, at least for folks doing this. Setting up things
| like this is a common tactic in a lot of common financial
| crimes now a days.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Whenever I read these kinds of super-complicated scams, I can't
| help but think if the scammer would have instead invested all
| that time and effort into legitimate tech and interviewing
| skills, he/she could have just come in the front door! It's
| like the person who spends hundreds of hours putting together
| the perfect exam cheating scheme, where they could have instead
| put in half of that time actually studying!
|
| Or, in video form, the Kay & Peele Bank Heist[1]
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM
| notahacker wrote:
| The guy organising it appears to be living in a lower middle
| income country with technical skills limited to badly
| installing WordPress plugins and doubts about his spoken
| English.
|
| Even if he actually has the capability to become a _really_
| good programmer, I 'm not sure he's going to beat getting
| half of potentially dozens of US-based developers' contract
| incomes for less effort than spamming job boards and running
| a Slack channel
| jeroenhd wrote:
| No matter how much work you put into setting up a scam,
| you'll never be able to beat the H1B lottery.
|
| Companies know that they can pay less money to people in poor
| countries because an American wage in a third world country
| would have them live like kings. Going the honest route
| significantly cuts your profits if you live in these
| countries.
|
| The "Plamen" person linked in this blog says he was educated
| in Sofia and Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. The average salary in
| Bulgaria ranges from $18k to $30k depending on the city
| (taking the optimistic route, here, sites like
| https://www.zaplatomer.bg/en/salaries-in-country give much
| lower numbers!); with an expected wage starting at $59k, they
| would be able to live a wealthy life earning twice the
| average wage just by getting lowballed by an American
| company. Spending that wage from a small California apartment
| wouldn't be nearly as profitable and comfortable as it would
| be living from a nice house in Bulgaria. All they'd need is a
| good internet connection and a shifted sleep schedule to take
| part in meetings.
|
| That's assuming the guy can actually deliver on his tasks. My
| guess would be that these scammers have limited technical
| skills and rely on waiting for the slow evaluation process to
| fire them and then moving on to the next company.
| treis wrote:
| In a lot of ways it's a convoluted form of arbitrage. These
| people "buy" developer labor in the cheap markets and "sell"
| in the expensive ones. Obviously bad when the developer labor
| doesn't get delivered as advertised. But if you can pull it
| off then mostly good for everyone.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I could not stand this anymore listening to someone
| legitimately claim they were me...So I turned on my camera,
| renamed myself back and asked the individual what the hell they
| were doing... However, before I did that. I wanted to childishly
| email the address of the person impersonating me._
|
| WHY!? the undercover vicitm doesn't jump up and shout when the
| crime starts to go down, except to drive the plot in really bad
| tv series.
|
| This could have been the beginning of a new Cliff Stoll _Cuckoo
| 's Egg_ thriller! I am dissapoint, but I guess "who has time for
| all that?" Interesting story nonetheless.
|
| It brings to mind these immortal words (needs more line breaks
| but then it would be longer):
|
| _If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs
| and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men
| doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
|
| If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about,
| don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And
| yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise
|
| If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; If you can
| think - and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with
| Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
|
| If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves
| to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life
| to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools
|
| If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one
| turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your
| beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;
|
| If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your
| turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is
| nothing in you Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
|
| If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with
| Kings - nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving
| friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too
| much;
|
| If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth
| of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
| And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!_
|
| If: A Father's Advice to His Son -- Rudyard Kipling
| SergeAx wrote:
| Reading this I was thinking about how desperate some companies
| are to hire anyone to get job done. And the definition of done in
| that case is just make the code working - no matter how low
| quality it would be and how hard it would be to read and update
| for the next John Doe from Upwork. It's a race to the bottom
| inside race to the bottom.
| FpUser wrote:
| This post made me look up my name on Upwork. Luckily I am not
| there. Currently contemplating wiping out my info from LinkedIn
| dabernathy89 wrote:
| If you are a software developer, check to make sure you aren't
| being impersonated on Upwork as well. A couple months back
| someone (I think I know who, but have no proof) was posing as me,
| and a suspicious client noticed that the person they were
| chatting with on video did not look that much like me in real
| life. Two other PHP/Laravel devs had impersonators on Upwork as
| well around the same time.
|
| One of these other devs only noticed because the client sent a
| calendar invite to his real email, instead of the one provided by
| the impostor.
|
| [edit - I'm reading through the original post, and I see now that
| this was all done through Upwork as well. Yikes!]
| georgiecasey wrote:
| all things aside, it'd be a great ego-boost if someone thought
| me good enough to impersonate on Upwork
| wildrhythms wrote:
| How might someone 'check' for this on Upwork?
| dabernathy89 wrote:
| I just do a search for my full name and the impersonators
| will show up first in the results.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I actually have a weekly google alert that searches for my full
| name, which fortunately/unfortunately is basically unique. It's
| normally nothing but a handful of false positives, but the week
| I appeared in the local news lit it up like a Christmas tree.
| paraknight wrote:
| I knew immediately it's Upwork. This is extremely common on
| there. The main reason is because developers in Western countries
| can demand higher rates. Just watch out for the red flags:
| mismatching LinkedIn experience, no camera during interview,
| incorrect accent, etc. Don't trust the reviews because accounts
| are routienly shared and/or sold.
|
| I've had some fun with this before where a developer with a
| clearly Chinese accent, and of course no webcam, posed as German
| (mispronouncing his own name) and freaked out when I switched to
| conducting the interview in German. Of course I notified the
| person whose identity he stole and reported the profile to
| Upwork, but it's a drop in the bucket of the scams.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The main reason is because developers in Western countries
| can demand higher rates. Just watch out for the red flags ...
| incorrect accent, etc.
|
| At least in America, that's not a valid tell. There are tons of
| developers in Western countries that have foreign accents.
| rippercushions wrote:
| "Incorrect" here means the accent not matching the name. For
| example, it's unlikely that a person named Connor Tumbleson,
| who according to their resume was educated and has worked in
| the US all their life, would have a Chinese accent. (Not
| _impossible_ , of course, but unlikely.)
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _no camera during interview_
|
| to me this is immediate no hire. If you can't be bothered to
| show your face, I can't trust you.
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| In 1996, my employer got a contract to work with AT&T to build a
| website that provided regular event updates from the Atlanta
| Olympics. In 1996, this was a very big deal, such a newish
| concept that the project was written up in AdAge or some similar
| industry magazine.
|
| A few months later a prospective junior engineer came in for an
| interview. My manager asked him the typical "tell me about an
| interesting project you've worked on lately." He then proceeded
| to describe in detail the very project we had just completed,
| even referencing the magazine article about it (he must have
| forgotten he was interviewing at the company mentioned in the
| article). At the end of his presentation, my manager said "That's
| interesting, because here at X, we just completed that project."
|
| Awkward silence. Then the interviewee got up and said "I guess I
| should go now." My manager said "Yes, I guess you should."
|
| Impersonation of this sort can be simultaneously disturbing and
| somehow comical. It isn't a new phenomenon; I'm not decided on
| whether I believe the information age makes it easier or more
| difficult.
| tg9000 wrote:
| What a small world! Unless you are also making up that story
| (which I would get a huge laugh out of) I'm 99% positive I was
| in the room with you when this happened. :)
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| I wasn't in the room, but my manager was. Is that you,
| Preserved Killick?
| tg9000 wrote:
| This is TG. I was the one who had to go on-site with this
| app in Atlanta for five weeks. I messaged you on Linked In.
| :)
| codazoda wrote:
| Wait! Are you his manager or the imposter?!?!
| birracerveza wrote:
| This thread is sus all the way down
| Aperocky wrote:
| There's a high possibility that he's the imposter of the
| imposter.
| caf wrote:
| It's impostors all the way down.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| What the heck is going on in this thread?
| NonNefarious wrote:
| <click>
|
| Candidate 1 has left the chat
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| punnerud wrote:
| Good story, but how do you search on Google Analytics IDs?
|
| "You can reverse those sites to find a couple hundred of domains
| on that IP, then cross-check the list against matching Google
| Analytics IDs and find almost 50 domains"
| [deleted]
| almog wrote:
| This story gave me an idea for a different kind of scam in which
| the scammer acts as a man in the middle between a candidate and
| an employer. The idea is that the scammer could pretend to be the
| employer, tempting the candidate to go through the interview
| process. Whether the employers decides the reject or extend an
| offer, in both cases the scammer "rejects" the candidate, and
| takes on the offer to cash out pay checks until they're being
| fired.
|
| The main technical challenge for a scammer would be to create a
| trustworthy looking email address so as to not raise the
| candidate's suspicion. It might not work with big companies but
| I've seen some companies using 3rd party services to send
| interviews invitation so it's not completely unlikely that this
| could work.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I wonder how widespread this really is?
|
| If it's reasonably common, there might be a place for a
| "reputation protection" service in the tech community - a service
| that watches various contracting and hiring sites for its members
| names, then notifies the real person when their name is used.
|
| I could see it being a real issue in the future if someone's
| professional reputation is tarnished this way. If a prospective
| employer searched for a candidate and found multiple profiles
| with very different skills listed, that would be a huge red flag.
| Worse, if the fraudulent person was hired and then fired, that
| information could find its way to places where the real person is
| applying.
|
| If they were able to successfully land a job like this, I could
| also see that messing with the real person's tax situation.
|
| ... I'm off to look for my name on Upwork, I guess.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| My new startup is a protection racket! Sure would be a shame if
| your good reputation was tarnished by some low-skill offshore
| devs...
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Wanna buy my list of customers who let their subscriptions
| end?
| awb wrote:
| I had a similar experience back in 2008 when I started a fully
| remote digital agency.
|
| One of my first employees was doing fantastic work, until his
| performance fell to 0 - no communication, no deliverables,
| nothing. Turns out, he stopped paying the subcontractor that
| was doing his job for him.
|
| The subcontractor contacted me months after I fired the
| employee and confessed. Apparently, the long-pauses and loud
| typing during my conversations with the employee was the
| employee messaging the subcontractor asking for help answering
| my questions.
|
| So, in my case, the employee was still the front. In this case,
| they're attempting to eliminate that bottleneck by just having
| the subcontractor impersonate the employee.
| pnw wrote:
| This reminds me of the time I agreed to hear a seed pitch from a
| Web3 company and they accidentally showed a slide where they had
| copied text from my LinkedIn profile onto their team slide under
| an unnamed VP that was "soft circled". The text was distinctive
| enough that I immediately recognized it and it couldn't have been
| any other person. I'd never met them before that call and wasn't
| looking for a job.
| mherdeg wrote:
| Is any actual work happening here? Does someone ever sign an
| offer letter and start checking in source code?
| lazide wrote:
| Many (most?) large companies might take months to fire someone
| even if it was blatant and obvious. Process to follow, etc.
|
| Considering how distracted and overwhelmed many managers are
| right now, some might go _years_ before catching on.
|
| Even if no code got checked in. Chances are, they could also
| farm out a bit here and there to a friend to make it a harder
| problem to resolve for the company.
| fallat wrote:
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| There exists public information about me and yet I don't really
| expect people to impersonate me on interviews. I guess I'm just
| naive.
| ghaff wrote:
| Anyone who would be interested in hiring me knows who I am.
| But I'm not someone you'd hire on the basis of keywords or a
| LinkedIn profile I basically haven't touched in years.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| As for motivation, maybe cash out one or two paychecks? Dunno how
| it works in the US, but where I live that would be hard without
| any ID or tax information. Maybe they'll request the first
| paycheck as a cashiers check? Paypal payment? Who knows. But
| 1-2-3 months worth of US-level salary would be a fortune in some
| parts of the world.
|
| In the days of remote work, it would not surprise me a bit if
| there are organized criminals doing this 24/7. Just churning out
| job applications, hiring people off fiverr, upwork, etc. to do
| the interviews, collect a paycheck or two and disappear. Could
| easily be worth $5000-$20000 pr. scam, if they manage to get
| hired.
| macintux wrote:
| Related active discussion in this thread. Ask HN: Have you
| experienced "hiring fraud?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996457
| [deleted]
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: "I then learned this was a interviewee discovered through
| Upwork - so I asked for all the proof and continued my
| investigation
|
| ......
|
| I'm not sure how this actually pans out if it works. Can you
| really refuse to use video for the entire contract of the job?
| How do you get paid if you need to submit tax documents? Do you
| pretend to be me forever?"
|
| Having over 15 years working as freelancer through Upwork I can
| answer that.
|
| 1 - Can you really refuse to use video for the entire contract of
| the job? Yes, you can. But only if you're good at your job. 90%
| of my clients never knew my real face. I only did video calls
| with the other 10% of them while we were already deep in the
| project(s) and trust was already well established. I do prefer
| voice over written chat though so I have weekly calls with all of
| them.
|
| 2 - How do you get paid if you need to submit tax documents?
| Upwork is great in that perspective. They have a lot of FAQ
| helping you with all tax informations and if that fails you have
| live chat too, with support. However, in this case, being the
| fact it was an impostor, Upwork style of getting paid and filing
| for taxes are 2 different beasts they frankesteined together. You
| still get paid under the fake name using your desired method of
| payment and filing taxes under your real name, which is done
| outside of Upwork's control.
|
| 3 - Do you pretend to be me forever? Not necessarily actually.
| You can do bait&switch. Bait clients, do good work for them,
| create a great relationship with them. Then either you create a
| new profile under real you and move projects there or move them
| outside Upwork forever. The fake identity sham is only there to
| help land the clients in the first place. Once you hook them and
| they depend on you, they really don't care about Upwork's
| protection and all that, they just want work to be done.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Why didn't they make a up totally fake person with a fake history
| instead of using a real person? I feel like it's possible to do,
| even fake a github.
| sigio wrote:
| It't way more work to make a fake profile, with actual
| contributions to different (real) repositories, then just
| pretend to be an existing one.
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| If they want to actually start and collect a few paychecks,
| then they'll need to pass a background check from HireRight or
| whoever. This'll probably include transcript checks, verifying
| past employment, etc.
|
| Much easier to just use a real person's identity.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Even for simple freelance gigs?
| sarchertech wrote:
| They would also need to steal the persons SSN and likely need
| to get through one of those identity check questionnaires
| from credit agencies. And they'd probably need to fake an ID
| as well.
|
| Non trivial stuff for a specific target.
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| Wow. This is creepy. Props to the interviewer for allowing the
| real Connor to stay on the interview and observe.
|
| This is one of my big problems with LinkedIn. We put so much
| information out there in public, it's really easy for people do
| do this. That information can also be used for things worse than
| applying for jobs.
|
| I think small companies hiring freelancers are most vulnerable to
| this. In the UK at least companies have to carry out very strict
| right to work checks, including passports, National Insurance
| numbers, etc.
| djitz wrote:
| A company I was working for wanted to bring on a couple of
| freelance devs for a short-term project and I had to handle the
| interviews.
|
| I ended up uncovering a whole scheme where an experienced dev
| in the US would hop on the calls/video interview and then the
| actual work would be handed off to some other people based
| overseas.
|
| If you tried to contact the "dev" for something, your call
| would be routed to a google voice number and you'd receive a
| text message in somewhat broken English shortly after.
|
| Their scam only lasted a few hours with us, but I often wonder
| how well they are able to pull this off.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was once pulled in to observe (in the "are you seeing this
| shit?" sense) an interview where someone off screen was
| answering questions and the person on camera was moving his
| lips. I'm not sure if they wanted me to share in the joke, or
| verify that there was no form of latency that would make lips
| and audio fail so badly to line up. I'm pretty good at
| pattern matching. There was no pattern. It was two guys
| pulling a fast one. Or at least trying to.
|
| This was an outsourcing group. In the grand scheme of things,
| "white people are stupid" is not entirely wrong, but there's
| a line you know. And there are lines beyond that line. And
| then there are these assholes off in the distance.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I did this for a friend to help him land a job. We got away
| with it.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| Do you think you helped anyone in this scenario?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| My friend, who is still earning a 200K salary 9 months
| later. He got terrible initial reviews, but they kept
| him.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Sounds like they're stealing that salary, not earning it.
| Hope they work at a place that will never affect me
| personally.
| bad416f1f5a2 wrote:
| > Sounds like they're stealing that salary, not earning
| it.
|
| On the contrary - if someone has been at a company for 9
| months & had terrible early reviews, the company had
| about ~6 months to deal with them. In my experience,
| truly bad hires get lukewarm 30 day feedback, negative 3
| month feedback, and are on a PIP soon after.
|
| If you're there after 9 months, it suggests you've
| demonstrated some level of value to your employer.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I can assure you there are plenty of underperforming,
| incompetent and even flat out absent employees cozied up
| in hidden little niches at all kinds of companies that
| don't let them go for a variety of reasons.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Shhh!!!
| chasd00 wrote:
| this happens all the time in big companies, you find
| people who are basically just a potted plant in the
| corner soaking up a salary and benefits.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| (upvote) its encouraging to see real info like this here
| - especially when semi-anonymity supports that
| stewarts wrote:
| Had similar while hiring for a Sr Dev. The person who first
| joined the call was not able to articulate any of the
| frontend or backend work they had done at the previous
| contracted company.
|
| Call goes static, call drops.
|
| "Person" rejoins. Who is obviously a completely different
| person who was able to thoroughly fill in the previous
| details missed.
|
| We ended the call there. Mistake: didn't require video for
| the session when the first individual proclaimed they were
| having issues with video.
| frank_nitti wrote:
| I'm floored by this. We have a sr engineer who conducted
| an initial technical screen and swore he saw this
| happening, the person on screen moving his mouth while
| someone else talked and wrote the code. My managers
| recounted this story to me, laughing because they thought
| the suspicion was ridiculous and that the interviewer was
| just being paranoid (they had not been on the call).
| Turns out he was not paranoid...
| mlsu wrote:
| Linkedin is an absolutely massive security hole. I'm surprised
| at the degree to which it _hasn 't_ been exploited.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is one of the many reasons I don't dilvulge anything on
| LinkedIn and merely use it as a funnel to my contact page on my
| own site.
| stefanka wrote:
| What difference does this make if the information is on your
| own site? Or do you share upon request only?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's available upon request only.
| darepublic wrote:
| Legit worried about these shenanigans now. So much info is leaked
| via job searching.
| [deleted]
| tgbugs wrote:
| I had to review a number of developer resumes from a similar site
| back in 2020. Reading through them absolutely set off my "this is
| a fake person" detector. The resumes had similar formats, they
| all seemed to point to a real person, but there was a lingering
| sense of similarity between them which was too much to account
| for. I though it might have been because the site provided a way
| to create resumes and they were all choosing from some common set
| of options or something like that. However, reading this account
| makes me think that a scam like this is an equally likely
| explanation.
| fatih-erikli wrote:
| I stopped joining interviews/working with companies for similar
| reasons. I do freelance. I suggest you to do the same, until the
| time when the market gives us an ethical and a fair working
| space. Unfortunately spamming/impersonating people became a
| normal thing and people don't even feel ashamed for it. They do
| it like its their normal job. (Especially Indians, sorryaboutthat
| but I won't be politically correct for this case. Work on fixing
| that in your community if you feel offended.)
|
| Also the story sounds like he/she's somebody around your close
| circle. Maybe you can stop what you're doing and spend some time
| to filter some people out.
| enviclash wrote:
| This exposes the truth about showcasing who we are all the time
| all around the internet, why too many details are needed out
| there anyway? I will keep posting my CV online, but really, it
| makes me feel like I should not.
| atleta wrote:
| While it's not at all surprising, it was a fun read. Having used
| Elance/Upwork in the past, I was pretty sure quite a lot of off-
| shore (Indian, Eastern European) companies do a similar scheme.
| At least some of them definitely pretend to be a single developer
| and/or let one developer with better skills (communication and
| programming-wise) do the interview and then throw cheaper
| "resources" at the actual project.
|
| The surprising part was that Maris/PND seems to have a pretty
| good command of English himself, so he could have easily done
| this without involving other people and thus mostly avoid being
| caught. Though maybe he runs a larger operation and he simply
| needs more people to do this.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> discovered through Upwork_
|
| That's been my own experience with Upwork (as someone looking for
| work).
|
| 100% of the contacts I received _(100%, like in Every. Single.
| One.)_ was a scam (either trying to scam me, or inviting me to
| participate in a scam).
|
| I realized that Upwork is a sewer, and quickly bailed.
|
| It's sad, because I heard very good things about Upwork. Of
| course, these "very good things," all came from people who
| _hired_ through Upwork.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Isn't this the same modus as the North Korea scams that we've
| seen a few times before ? We've seen similar stories on HN and
| there was a darknet diaries episode about this too.
| victorclf wrote:
| These kind of frauds are really bad for legitimate remote
| workers. Hope employers don't get burned and start cutting back
| on remote opportunities.
| lazide wrote:
| A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push people
| back to the office is they have low confidence that line
| managers will catch these kinds of problems, and many more -
| including 'the guys working 4 jobs and barely doing anything
| for us', the 'guy starting his own company that competes with
| us at the same time as working for us', the 'guy who farms out
| all his work to subs in India', etc.
|
| It's easy to say 'if they don't notice, then clearly it's not a
| problem' - but it has downstream effects, like broken products,
| huge legal liabilities for the company including often scary
| handling of customer data to make it work, and morale hits as
| other folks pick up on things like this happening and being
| uncaught.
|
| These are real, albeit currently low percentage/high risk
| things that happen. The more people get away with it, the
| higher the percentages of people who will try (people
| rationalize it to themselves as 'everyone else is doing it',
| and 'I'd be foolish to not do the same thing everyone else
| is'.).
|
| The biggest issue I've seen with remote work (in practice), is
| it makes it really hard for a manager to see and _actually_
| understand what 's happening (not just what people SAY is
| happening, which is rarely the same thing), and makes it easier
| for employees to hide things they don't want others to see.
| Which leads to more of everything from undiscovered-until-too-
| late burnout, to team members who have no idea what to do or
| how to do it, to opportunists grifting.
| mk89 wrote:
| > A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push
| people back to the office
|
| Which is kind of useless for most of the points you described
| at the end. There are plenty of comments here really proving
| that you can scam even in person interviews. Let's say you
| are not scam, you pass an interview. You can still do all of
| those things while you work.
|
| The only way to prevent this is by having keyloggers and
| similar tools on the work laptop so that you can actually see
| what people do. And even then, if someone does "enough",
| would you really check? Probably most people nowadays
| wouldn't care, as long as you deliver.
|
| The truth is: most people are honest, they do "normal" work,
| they get a raise, etc. Then there is a percent of people
| which exploits the system. A system that let's be honest
| tries to profit from them too by giving lower wages, etc.
| lazide wrote:
| It's harder/nearly impossible to scam at scale in person.
|
| It's also way more obvious and personal when it happens,
| and it's a lot easier to actually physically arrest someone
| if it gets really weird or out of hand, not that it was
| common for that to happen.
|
| I think we're seeing the birth of a new industry, the
| equivalent of Nigerian email scams, but with job
| interviews.
|
| Exciting!
| frellus wrote:
| It's so weird and creepy .. thanks for posting all the details of
| the investigation. I hope the person is nailed, but in the end
| this is the dark part of the internet. There's no end to fraud,
| identity theft and scams.
| mcast wrote:
| Maybe it's time to add PGP public keys to resumes.
| aclatuts wrote:
| My first thought. PGP in video calls, PGP with email, etc..
|
| When I searched for PGP in the comments, this was the only one
| that mentioned it which is hard for me to believe.
| dctoedt wrote:
| I hope Andrew [0] -- the college junior with morals who blew the
| whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author --
| gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was
| having a hard time with that.
|
| The author's sleuthing is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll's _The
| Cuckoo 's Egg_ from 1989. [1]
|
| [0] Andrew blogs at https://unfooling.com/, according to the
| article.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
| devwastaken wrote:
| Unless their moral karma somehow bypasses keyword filtering,
| leetcode, and discrimination, unlikely.
| javajosh wrote:
| Perhaps at the end of the day that's what the scam was about,
| getting Andrew an internship. I mean if I was writing the movie
| that would be the twist at the end
| lmarcos wrote:
| He he. For a second, that's what I thought as well. But I
| want to believe the story is legit.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I hope Andrew [0] -- the college junior with morals who blew
| the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author
| -- gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently
| was having a hard time with that.
|
| Excellent point.
|
| I've been wondering about ways to test students on
| "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet
| least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank
| skills, knowledge, salary, even age/gender/race above
| dependability/loyalty, or barely consider the latter at all.
|
| Other than lengthy vetting and imprecise security clearance
| procedures this is such a hard quality to discern, and so
| costly when you miss the mark. The costs of defection,
| industrial espionage, and sabotage seem poorly quantified in
| HR. I think a corrosion of work relations has come about from
| devaluation of workers qua humans, and the corresponding
| disrespect people have towards their places of work. Is that
| inevitable under capitalism/efficiency?
|
| And, harder question... does it even matter? Especially once
| AIs and remote agents take-over many jobs? Does a corporation
| _care_ if the worker is an imposter and liar who abused a false
| identity to get the post, so long as they produce working
| results?
|
| Is there a kind of moral Turing test here? What do work
| relations have to do with human-relations in the limit of the
| present trajectory?
| vsareto wrote:
| >Does a corporation care if the worker is an imposter and
| liar who abused a false identity to get the post, so long as
| they produce working results?
|
| It's definitely a concern when you need to worry about spies
| infiltrating your company
| lazide wrote:
| Also - how likely are they to be able to continue doing so,
| and how much of my companies sensitive information is being
| leaked to who knows where by whom? Including data that
| opens up the company to some giant liability lawsuit or PR
| issue later?
| ttyprintk wrote:
| How would you like to constantly wonder if Steven in HR,
| who has enough of your personal info to take out loans in
| your name, can just vanish tomorrow without a trail?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm big on personal Integrity.
|
| It doesn't seem to win me any points.
|
| In fact, it seems to actually count against me, as I'm
| sometimes accused of being "snobby."
|
| Ah, well...
|
| STORY TIME:
|
| A few months after I had been promoted (the first time) to a
| manager, one of my new employees was hired by my boss' boss,
| while I was out on medical leave.
|
| When I got back, I found out that he had made a promise to
| the new (now hired) employee, that he was not "legally"
| allowed to do, and had to let the guy do it (because he
| promised).
|
| He asked me to sign it off.
|
| I declined, sure that my job was in jeopardy.
|
| Surprisingly, he took it well, and it was never mentioned
| again (until now). He actually had a lot of Integrity, and
| was uncomfortable with it (it was a mistake; not deliberate).
| nicky0 wrote:
| I once had a job where my manager asked me to fake some
| results to deceive a customer. I refused. Later the manager
| apologised to me and upon reflection agreed it was wrong,
| and the matter was never brought up again. But I had a
| better relationship with that manager after that.
| suoduandao2 wrote:
| I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to
| make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not
| a more common question, but of course that makes it work -
| truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came
| up regularly.
| geekbird wrote:
| I would put it as "Tell me about a time when you had to
| take an ethical stand or make a choice based on ethics."
| dleslie wrote:
| I like "Tell me about a time you failed miserably,
| absolutely and unequivocally, and how you recovered from
| it."
|
| It's surprising how illuminating the responses are.
| laumars wrote:
| I remember in one job the company had a set of questions
| we had to ask candidates on top of the technical
| questions. One of them was "what would you describe as
| your biggest weakness?"
|
| I always grown when I have to ask that question because
| you always get some stupid answers where people say
| things like "I'm just too organised" or similar spin to
| make a negative sound like a positive. Frankly I can't
| blame them because it's a ridiculous question to ask.
|
| However this one candidate not only listed off one flaw
| but three of them. I remember thinking "shut up, shut up,
| shut up. You're not supposed to answer this honestly!"
|
| However this ironically turned out to be the reason I
| hired him. I figured if he is that honest and able to
| identify his flaws then he must have a good work ethic.
|
| He turned out to be one of my best ever junior hires.
| dleslie wrote:
| I tend to coach the question to prevent people from
| giving it a softball, with something like "I have
| certainly caused my fair share of crisis, what I'm
| interested in is the experiences you ..."
|
| It's an adequate test to filter out folks who are simply
| incapable of accepting responsibility for their actions,
| or who have yet to really shoulder enough responsibility
| to meaningfully fail.
| notahacker wrote:
| I'd have thought a lot of completely regular candidates
| would be a bit stumped by that (especially since many non-
| trivial moral judgements are personal life stuff that's
| _really_ off limits for interviews)
|
| Although maybe that's the point: psychopathic candidates
| end up making up fairly unconvincing heroic stories whereas
| regular people look a bit confused and maybe mention
| something they _didn 't_ do because they couldn't trust it
| was legitimate or ask if their decision to volunteer their
| time for $cause counts.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I think it goes without saying that interview questions
| are asking about your work life,. altho it might help if
| the interviewer specifies that anyway, i.e. "Tell us
| about a time you had to make a moral judgment at work"
| notahacker wrote:
| The point is more that "moral judgements" like the time
| you pointed out that the company might violate the AGPL
| might actually be good stories to tell an interviewer if
| you've lead a drama-free working life building CRUD apps
| for regular employers, but are pretty hard to recall when
| the first thing the words "moral judgement" bring to mind
| are the time you had to stop interacting with X because
| they did Y.
| shusaku wrote:
| A couple suggestions:
|
| * take them on a tour of your chocolate factory
|
| * ask them to pull a magical sword out of a stone
| foxbee wrote:
| This happened to me once. It got really weird. My partner and I
| didn't know there was a fake account made, and we later found
| out, for days this fake account was talking to my partner - being
| super nice and genuinely a better person than the actual real me.
|
| Anyway, they later asked my partner to send money to their
| personal account. I was a little bit sad.
| mahathu wrote:
| >On September 14, 2022 I got an email from someone that reeked
| eerily of a scam, but it turned out to be quite real. The full
| text is below.
|
| [...]
|
| Am I just naive, or does the email that followed below not sound
| like a scam at all to anyone else? Getting this, my alarm bells
| would indeed go off, but more in the "this person is probably
| telling the truth, someone might be impersonating me" department,
| not in "this person is trying to scam me"
| 101008 wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but
|
| > Thankfully I'm not sitting on a Windows machine and can just
| preview the document via Google without a fear of infecting
| myself.
|
| Is that true? Can you get infected by seeing a preview of a
| Google Doc from Gmail or even opening it on Google Docs? I
| thought the browser was isolated.
| darau1 wrote:
| Someone messaged me on reddit once, and straight up asked me to
| do exactly this. Below is the message, but I haven't included
| their name because I think they were at least trying to seem
| sincere.
|
| ---
|
| Hi, hope you're doing well.
|
| We are looking for a professional interviewee. I'm not sure if
| you've heard similar thing somewhere. We are a talented developer
| group specialized in web and mobile software development. We have
| partnerships with US people and deliver our service to clients by
| pretending to be US developers. And we share profits with them.
| Our partners are satisfied with this business model.
|
| Everything is perfect except on one thing. It's just the
| interview with clients. Normally in the interviews, the clients
| ask us some technical questions to see if we are able to deliver
| the service they expect. Because we are not native speakers, we
| are suffering from taking the interviews and many clients are
| passing by us even though they can get what they want. So we want
| a native interviewee and hope you are interested in this model.
|
| Please let me know if you're interested in further discussion.
| Thank you!
| jawns wrote:
| If it were really true that this development group could
| deliver according to client expectations, they would do what
| many other groups do: form a consultancy and hire an English-
| language speaker not as a fake interview candidate but as a
| liason.
|
| I worked with a firm that did this. Basically, they had one
| project manager who could speak decent English and about six
| developers who couldn't. The English-speaking PM was on calls
| with us, and then he'd farm out the work to the developers.
|
| It was a win-win, because their group was getting work, and we
| were getting decent results at a discounted rate compared with
| on-shore resources.
|
| But it's pretty clear that anyone looking for fake interview
| candidates is not actually planning to do that. They're
| essentially counting on the fact that it takes many companies a
| little while to get rid of a bad hire.
| darau1 wrote:
| I interviewed one guy that seemed to fit this description --
| he didn't speak much, and when he did his accent was strong.
| He had someone with him, that seemed to speak on his behalf.
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Spooky.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the main factor that drives the _alternative_ model
| is that a lot of people with jobs that could theoretically be
| undertaken by offshore agencies advertise for an onshore
| individual (sometimes because they have very strong reasons
| not to want to offshore, but also sometimes because they
| haven 't considered it). So there's a bigger market of better
| paying gigs out there for a "candidate" than an "offshore
| agency" (considerably better if they can actually deliver the
| work). Not that this particular entity seems to have had much
| ability...
|
| In the grey area, there's still a big difference between a
| liason taking on a load of freelance contracts for the farm
| under his real name and intermediating comms without ever
| mentioning there's actually six other people he's never met
| doing most of the work and identity theft to take on remote
| full time roles involving work they probably can't handle.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| I've heard of large consulting companies that do a "bait and
| switch" where the client initially talks to a fantastic
| technical person prior to signing a contract, then never hears
| from them again.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Similar to large law firms; a senior partner closes the deal,
| and then they shuffle you off onto an associate fresh off the
| bar (who often still bills out at the full senior partner
| rate!)
|
| Sometimes law firms don't even really disclose who's doing
| the work, and sometimes in their invoices they'll have a
| paralegal's initials under the "Atty" column.
|
| This is sometimes true even for very large and reputable law
| firms.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Hello, it me! Or was anyway.
|
| Every solution architect/ pre sales engineer you talk to
| before the ink is signed isn't there to do the work, they're
| there to build trust and confidence that the other folks who
| can't talk to a client are just as talented.
|
| Also you definitely hear from us again as we bill 4 hours a
| week or what have you for "Quality Assurance."
| pasc1878 wrote:
| That is normal - you have to add to the interview a
| requirement that you interview and have to approve each
| person assigned to work for you.
|
| It is amazing how many managers I have worked for who don't
| do that.
| rippercushions wrote:
| There are some legal sensitivities here: the company is
| hiring a vendor to provide a service, and risks co-
| employment issues if they start managing the vendor's staff
| in any way, including interviewing them.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i work for a consulting company and prefer to cradle-to-grave
| my projects but it makes it hard to move up the corporate
| ladder. I'm working on a proposal now for a large project
| that will span at least 3 years. If I ask to get staffed on
| it then i know it will get delivered as sold and I _may_ get
| promoted at the end but definitely won 't get promoted during
| the project. On the other hand, if i'm an author on three or
| four wins for large projects over a year then i'm much more
| likely to get promoted regardless of how those turnout at the
| end of their schedules.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Email providers should publicly disclose how old an email address
| is, and email clients should warn about emails coming from brand
| new addresses. My gmail account is 15 years old, so any email I
| send is unlikely to be created just to impersonate someone else.
|
| This doesn't help though if your name happens to be Kevin Smith
| or something.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| Speaking of the "Kevin Smith" case, I know of someone with a
| very common name going into an interview for a job he applied
| for - he was underqualified for the role and was surprised he
| was selected. Turns out the company had mixed him up with
| another candidate with the exact same name and sent out the
| interview invite to the wrong person!
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Did he get the job?
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Also just ratchets the value of "old email accounts" up a ton.
| Reddit has a similar problem with fraud coming from old tenured
| accounts with karma (upvote points similar to HN) becoming very
| valuable and targets for hackers and spammers.
|
| I don't know about new addresses, but it sounds like more
| robust vetting is needed on the interviewing side. Resumes and
| initial screens have become potentially stale and too easy to
| fake.
| cfeduke wrote:
| Kind of related - I worked in the defense industry in the early
| 00s. I found out a couple years after I left a certain defense
| contractor that defense contractor was still using my credentials
| along with other current and former employees to submit for
| contracts.
| yazzku wrote:
| What is the end game from the scammer's point of view? Sign-on
| bonus? I don't understand how that would work given all the legal
| work required. At some point the fake identity must be made
| obvious?
| madrox wrote:
| About 12 years ago, I attended a barcamp (blast from the past)
| where someone gave an SEO talk about how to hack search and
| adwords to provide no value but capture eyeballs and trick people
| into clicking on things to make money. I recall many references
| to a wider community they were a part of that did this, traded
| tips and tricks, and generally evolved their trade of grifting at
| scale.
|
| I can't help but feel there's a whole community of people out
| there with few morals who are trading tips on how to set up scams
| like this. The "web of lies" seems so deep and complicated I
| can't imagine this whole thing was built in a vacuum by one
| person.
| rkagerer wrote:
| That's a nice bit of detective work you did.
|
| What happened is fraud, and potentially harmful to your
| reputation. If you can afford it, consider seeking legal remedy.
| It sounds like the twits running this scam are amateurs and its
| possible services like Zoom could unveil better leads toward
| pinpointing the perpetrators if compelled. Google's impersonation
| policy seems particularly wanting. You could consider reporting
| to law enforcement as well, for what that might be worth.
|
| Thanks for sharing and I hope your story serves as an example to
| those who are out there hiring to stay alert.
| level wrote:
| Cached mirror, since I'm getting a gateway timeout:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220927155115/https://connortum...
| ajsharp wrote:
| I got an offer for something similar from someone recently,
| wanting to rent my codementor account that I haven't used in half
| a decade. Strange times.
| biermic wrote:
| Had this happen to me as a client on Upwork.
|
| Interviewed some Italian guy, but when the job started a Russian
| guy with Asian roots was on the cam.
|
| Somehow I understand his situation, but nevertheless ended the
| call after one minute.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| This seems similar to reports of North Koreans running deep fake
| interviews
| frdsndr wrote:
| Yikes... Scary stuff; better and easier to generate Deep Fakes
| will perhaps make this an even bigger problem in the coming
| years. We going to need builtin detection features in
| Teams/Zoom/etc.
|
| Maybe deepfake-detection will be the next-gen's Anti-Virus
| business? :)
| b800h wrote:
| Can't raise the site right now:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220927224436/https://connortum...
| sebastien_b wrote:
| > _"The fake Connor Tumbleson immediately left the Zoom call."_
|
| I guess he felt the ultimate Impostor Syndrome.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Careful or he'll change his twitter handle to "thought leader"
| and write an self-help ebook about it.
| slang800 wrote:
| Woah, small world. I got an email from "Maris" too, back in July:
| https://imgur.com/a/Q7pq9uu
|
| I never responded to it, since it reads like an obvious scam, but
| I had no idea the scam was this elaborate.
| raydiatian wrote:
| I had a similar experience on Triplebyte, but didn't have the
| nerve to pursue the line as far as Connor did here.
|
| Was reached out to on Triplebyte by a guy claiming to work for a
| large casino in Las Vegas which I won't name. Asked me to sign an
| NDA before the interview or that he would tell me what the job
| was. Couldn't find him on LinkedIn or anything. The NDA was a
| word document which I think I signed via online service but never
| physically opened on my machine because (thank god?) I don't own
| Microsoft word, on a Windows machine.
|
| Pretty sure it was some sort of scam, but I couldn't for the life
| of me figure out what it was they were after. Perhaps this is it.
| lupire wrote:
| Might just "hire" you, get your vital data, and then
| impersonate you to get a loan or withdraw from your bank.
| tylerc230 wrote:
| I had something similar happen to me a few years back. Someone
| using my photo and profile from my personal site and uploaded it
| to upwork to get contract work. I found out b/c someone hired
| them for a contract (thinking they were me) and got suspicious.
| The employer found my real email on my site and contacted me. Not
| sure what I can do to prevent it. I put a warning on my site
| saying to look out for impersonators.
| renewiltord wrote:
| How does this work in the end? You'll fail the background check
| when you send in your SSN.
| Zigurd wrote:
| My name is evidently hard to pronounce, even though the spelling,
| which is seldom right, is phonetic. It is specific to an obscure
| ethnicity. Except for also being my father's name, it is globally
| unique. I own the .com of my first name. Despite the occasional
| annoyances, I appreciate it as a security feature.
| vidalia wrote:
| I'd love to understand the legal/tax aspects of this - what SSN
| and addresses does the "middle man" use - I get that it's easy to
| get an SSN but within a matter of a year most of the work would
| be discovered come tax time. And IMO the best parts of Tech are
| the actual vesting and RSU/Option packages an employee gets.
| pophenat wrote:
| While working for one of the largest consultancies, I had to
| interview an offshore candidate for an onshore position in my
| team. It was a database development job and I asked the typical
| SQL questions, data modelling, etc - all over Skype with no
| camera. The guy on the other side seemed very knowledgeable.
| Amazingly high level for the job actually, and better than what
| his CV suggested. Being an internal candidate, I did not suspect
| anything and recommended him for the job. A month or so after
| that, management flew him in and I got to meet him in person. To
| my surprise, his language skills and much less his technical
| skills were anywhere near what I experienced at the interview. He
| was very keen to be a manager, with very very poor SQL skills -
| even in theory. A friend of mine later told me that it is a
| common practice in the offshore dev center to let the good devs
| interview for positions and then to send another person to do the
| job. They apparently did that to clients quite often and it was
| not surprising to him that I got the same treatment - even though
| it was an internal assignment.
| toyg wrote:
| I mean, this is not incredibly different from consultancies
| sending their crack A-team to pitch a project and then a bunch
| of freshly-recruited graduates to actually build it. All big
| firms do it. I can see some particularly entrepreneurial fellow
| overseas experiencing it once and then going "well, if they can
| get away with it, why couldn't we...?"
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This is utterly creepy. Kudos to the college kid who did the
| right thing here.
|
| I've never had anyone try to impersonate me for a job, but I have
| had people steal my photos and create Tinder profiles using them
| in cities I don't live in (I've been alerted because people who
| recognized me sent me screenshots). I tried to catfish the person
| who was using my photos to catfish others, but was unsuccessful.
| I dreamed of doing what Connor did, which was to confront the
| person who was using my face on a video call.
|
| I'm so sorry this happened to Connor but am grateful he
| documented this sort of scam, which I fear is probably a lot more
| common than we know. I see people on TikTok all the time
| encouraging these sorts of outsourcing scams of taking jobs on
| Upwork or something else and then hiring people to do the work on
| Fiver or in markets where the cost of labor is much, much lower.
| Do this with enough volume and you could make decent money, I
| imagine.
|
| But how utterly distasteful for the victim.
| Cyphase wrote:
| You're probably a larger target for that sort of thing. Luckily
| you have a larger-than-average number of people who would
| recognize your face to alert you.
| adamrezich wrote:
| what gets me about this story is that they chose a developer to
| impersonate who seems to have a pretty dang unique name. I share
| my name with only one other person in the world, but going by a
| quick google search at least, Connor is the only Connor Tumbleson
| in the world (or at least online). this seems like a pretty big
| liability--if I was in charge of running this nefarious group I
| would stay away from names like Connor Tumbleson, and instead go
| for impersonating Bob Johnsons and John Andersons or whatever.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| From the headline alone, I was hoping this would be someone
| writing about being the subject of Nathan Fielder's "The
| Rehearsal".
| ogn3rd wrote:
| Allow me! It was awful and Nathan should be done with
| television as he's incapable of empathy.
| burlesona wrote:
| So my guess is that the scam ends with the scammer negotiating a
| "deposit" to start contract work, and once the deposit is paid
| they disappear. Otherwise I think this scam would be a lot more
| work than just actually getting programming gigs and doing the
| programming work.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| The way I read it is: the scammer will secure the contract
| using the help of their industry-decorated accomplice, and then
| outsource the actual work-related duties to developers they
| find on Upwork, etc.
| fortran77 wrote:
| After seeing several stories like this on Hacker News, I've
| pulled down my LinkedIn profile. There's no reason to have your
| resume on-line.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| >So we can see the 35 members in this Slack, but I don't feel
| comfortable posting that list. I have no idea who is real or fake
| and who may be working for this company unaware of what is
| actually happening.
|
| >So I sent an email to two of them after I found them on LinkedIn
| to further help investigate this. One immediately responded
| unaware of this behavior occurring and left the group.
|
| Although I admire the authors restraint, I am more than a little
| unimpressed with one of the contacted being "unaware" of the
| behavior. "Excuse me, did you know you're in a group that is
| actively committing crimes?" How do you think they're going to
| respond?
| corywatilo wrote:
| Upwork just doesn't care.
|
| I was on the receiving end of one of these recently. I was
| looking for US-based contractor, found someone whose profile
| looked legit, and reached out. In the phrasing I got back via
| email, I knew this wasn't the native English speaker I was
| expecting.
|
| Here's my thread:
| https://twitter.com/watilo/status/1561795264888901633
| janandonly wrote:
| If your fake profile is not on Upwork yet, then you apparently
| have a disappointing (or at least a not marketable) career.
| patrakov wrote:
| Or you have a real Upwork profile.
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| I had this exact same thing happen a few years ago, with an
| internal employee.
|
| They had gotten someone else from the India office to conduct the
| interview. He said his camera wasn't working and we didn't think
| anything of it.
|
| He aced the interview, even made good recommendations on the
| project he would be running.
|
| The guy that showed up wasn't even at a junior level. It became
| painfully obvious after a couple of days. Pure red flags but the
| highlight...
|
| - When asking for a project plan on an enterprise level project
| his response was "I can code all this in 3 days".
|
| - Proceeds to supply broken code.
|
| - When mentioned the code doesn't work he gets aggressive and
| says other people on the team broke it.
|
| - Code gets reviewed by a senior architect (Bob) from another
| team. Turns out code was copied from an external github. So even
| if it worked it would be illegal to use.
|
| - They get aggressive saying that Bob is jealous.
|
| - Bob proceeds to document in detail the codes origin, legal
| details and points out where the code is broken.
|
| - Bob and senior management have a meeting with the guy, where he
| is asked supply his original code (which he can't). Is then asked
| to explain exactly what the code does.
|
| - Bob puts the cherry on the cake where he finds a simple broken
| function that anyone junior developer could see is wrong. Asks
| him to explain what is wrong with that code.
|
| After that the guy got fired. Not sure if they investigated
| further in the India branch. But it was embarrassing all round.
|
| I'm still not sure how the imposter planned to keep the job after
| getting it. I suspect the stand-in expected money and didn't get
| it. So didn't support them.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| This stuff only happens because of the huge discrepancy in
| salaries you can get based purely on geographic location.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| This story is much more fun when you come at it from the
| interviewer's position. You've been doing interviews every week.
| They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and
| over with minor variation. You're about to repeat the experience
| for the 18th time and you're 100% on autopilot. But suddenly
| you're in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that's ever
| happened.
|
| Is it a good legal/corporate decision to hide the person who
| claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview
| with the other candidate? Holy fuck, no. Is it going to be WAY
| more thrilling? Oh my god yes; how could you not?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Is it a good legal/corporate decision to hide the person who
| claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview
| with the other candidate?
|
| Consider the situation from the perspective of the interviewer:
| They don't have all of the background we did while reading this
| blog. They haven't even had time to process what Connor #1 said
| by the time that Connor #2 arrives.
|
| The decision to hear them both out for a few minutes is
| reasonable, IMO. At that point in time, Connor #1 could have
| been lying as far as the interviewer knew. Letting them both
| exist in the meeting immediately cleared up any confusion.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Letting them both in the same room at the same time was
| probably the safer thing. Maybe there's an argument, or maybe
| one bounces, clearing it up.
|
| But having one person _hide_ is riskier. It means a random
| person could eaves drop on my interview by just pretending to
| me and telling this story.
|
| I mean, super cool though. I imagine my adrenaline would be
| going as the interviewer. I'd probably chill out when I
| realized this was identity theft with extra steps, not a Kyle
| Reese situation.
| comboy wrote:
| Imagine inventing all of this just to listen to your
| interview.
|
| Incentive to do that would have to be pretty wild.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Stalkers gonna stalk. The "all of this" would just have
| to be getting the interview link/time (calendar or email
| access) and then showing up a bit early to tell the
| story.
|
| It is very very unlikely and I don't judge the
| interviewer for how they handled it.
| axus wrote:
| Definitely a Jerry Springer moment when he "could not stand
| this anymore" and jumped back into the conversation.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >It means a random person could eaves drop on my interview
| by just pretending to me and telling this story.
|
| Only if the random person somehow found out the meeting
| code.
| Stamp01 wrote:
| Which one do I shoot!?
| dhosek wrote:
| Best to be sure. Shoot them both.
| icambron wrote:
| This was my immediate reaction too. Would make my whole week.
| fatjokes wrote:
| Haha, when you put it like that, I can totally see why the
| interviewer was "awesome" and let the guy stay on. He was
| totally there for the drama.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Now that I think about it, I bet you could put together a
| pretty successful YouTube series of messing with zoom
| interviews in ways just like this. Get someone's identical
| twin to join the call and make them fight over who's the real
| one. Bring time travel into it. Make outlandish demands of
| the interviewer to prove that they're not a Zorblaxian spy.
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| The US TV series "Impractical Jokers" ran a few sketches in
| the last few years where they did exactly this...you'd
| probably enjoy.
| smcameron wrote:
| Like Catfish, but for jobs.
| glandium wrote:
| Not Zoom interviews, but there are Youtube videos of people
| messing up with other people on Omegle, with a fake skip
| screen. From the point of view of the pranked, what happens
| is they get to someone that ends up skipping them, get a
| different person, and the previous person shows up in the
| background or something.
| Thorrez wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSqexFg74F8
| conductr wrote:
| Some trainwreck interviews make for good office lore and this
| one tops the cake.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| You know that interviewer was shitting themselves when og Conor
| unmuted and said wtf mate.
| prepend wrote:
| It kind of reminds me of a time travel thriller. They have to
| act fast too as Connor#2 will be joining any second.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Oh, I'd be so in to take part in this drama. It would probably
| be one of the most memorable job interviews of all time.
|
| And I doubt there would be too many legal or corporate
| ramifications from allowing someone else to be on the call with
| their camera off. These are contractor positions, not full-
| time. Frankly, it's a risk I would take to be able to witness
| this sort of thing in real-time.
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, don't bet on it. What if #2 was real, and #1 was someone
| stalking #2? Or an abusive ex?
|
| If #2 doesn't get the the potential job, they could come
| after you for all sorts of things - emotional damages,
| economic damage (from not getting the job), etc. They might
| even be able to get the court to force you to give them the
| job, or at least waste years of your time and mental health
| dealing with legal hassles.
|
| It's hilarious and awesomely entertaining, but don't do it if
| you have assets someone could go after, as eventually,
| someone will.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I think the fact that it's a zoom interview changes things.
|
| Even if one of them is stalking the other, it's not like
| they're physically in the same conference room together.
| the worst they can really do is yell at each other.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I mean, you're hiring a contractor off of Upwork, not from
| a reputable consultancy (to be clear, I'm sure established
| consultancies do shady shit too, but the risk profile is
| different), so I think the risk is pretty small. We're
| talking edge cases on a scenario that is already an edge
| case.
| sinoue wrote:
| Even UpWork requires government ID verification.
| https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360010609234-ID...
|
| I wonder what financial fraud they'll need to do to get
| the funds as I'm assuming UpWork has to deal with tax
| payments being pulled out.
| sumedh wrote:
| > Even UpWork requires government ID verification.
|
| I dont think it will be too difficult for a scammer to
| setup a bank account with a false name.
| lupire wrote:
| Scammer can open a bank account using a fake ID for
| Connor. So they hire the real Connor but money goes to a
| foreign country, to an account owned by the imposter.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Yeah, I have to imagine they might be using a group
| account on Upwork and then misrepresenting the coder as a
| part of their team, but I don't know enough about how
| Upwork works.
|
| I posted about this blog post on Twitter and was directed
| a Reddit post [1] showing how little Upwork seems to care
| about fake reviews and stolen work product, so it appears
| Upwork has a history of ignoring fraud, regardless of
| what their terms say.
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/xavntw
| /freelan...
| dannyw wrote:
| Acting in good faith, does matter here.
| devwastaken wrote:
| An interviewer whom asks all the same questions is better
| suited in HR or hiring accountants. That's called a quiz, not
| an interview.
|
| When interviewing, you do an actual interview, which is where
| you research whom you're interviewing to gain good questions to
| ask so you get good answers back.
|
| The staleness and bore of interviewing is entirely the fault of
| the individual. Especially when they think whiteboarding
| compsci topics is meaningful.
| version_five wrote:
| I get the sense that "real Connor" must have been _extremely_
| good at concisely explaining the situation and giving the
| interviewer exactly the information he needed to believe real
| Connor and understand the situation. It made me think of one of
| those movies like groundhog day or "source code" where someone
| has multiple tries and eventually comes up with the most
| efficient possible thing to say to get someone to trust them.
| Well done!
| mizzao wrote:
| I feel like this PND thing might just be an agency for the
| folks on https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed to outsource the
| acquisition of their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs.
| RunSet wrote:
| Someone created a github account with my name and has been
| squatting it for years.
|
| Github support tells me they won't deactivate or rename the
| account (I don't want it, I just want it gone) unless I copyright
| my own name and file a copyright complaint with them.
| thih9 wrote:
| > So if you hired a Maris in February 2022 - you may want to
| double check who you actually hired.
|
| I'd love to hear a follow up.
| Abimelex wrote:
| Just imagine that all this could have been avoided if we would
| start using email signing ;)
| mrspence wrote:
| Incredibly, I think a job posting with the same end goal has just
| been posted on Code Mentor, by a profile made only in June
| (2022). I could be wrong, but just in case - I took a screengrab
| to share with you all (find here:
| https://i.imgur.com/up7sMg3.png). In case I'm wrong, I've blocked
| out the profile in this screenshot - however if Connor wishes to
| investigate, I have saved more details.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| This seems concerning.
|
| Is this going to be a new problem that the gov is not equipped to
| deal with? Are we going to need to be on high alert that one day
| the IRS is going to alert me that my tax bracket is 37% because
| of my income from the 6 jobs I'm working? Then it will take
| months or years of legal battles to "prove" I didn't actually
| work 6 full time jobs this year.
| blastwind wrote:
| Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange
| site.
|
| This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying
| to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly
| rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor
| variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment
| style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to
| two points. In fact, down to two pointers, left and right,
| iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it
| can trap.
|
| I'm about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I'm 100%
| on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and
| offers me up to $80/hr to be his senior engineer. This feels
| sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, "you're good but let's be honest
| here...". Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a
| beautiful thing. I'm asked to interview as one of our developers
| because English is not their best language. I'm a little
| bothered, but I was fine with it. But then I see the developer
| name: Connor Tumbleson. My laughter bursts and so does my
| suspicion: With a name like that, no way the guy doesn't speak
| good English. I look up Connor Tumbleson on linkedin, and my
| suspicions were proved correct. I detail everything to Connor,
| and now this is on the top of HN. I lost a opprotunity but gained
| a story of the lifetime.
| breck wrote:
| drop me an email if you are still looking for an internship
| breck@pldb.com. we usually use the rainwater question for our
| interviews but will have to try something else since you
| already had it
| comboy wrote:
| This comment thread feels like a game of Mafia[1].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)
| [deleted]
| wanderingmind wrote:
| <sarcasm> Plot twist. The same organization is pretending to be
| Andrew to get some work opportunities </sarcasm>. But
| seriously, its a breath of fresh air to see someone displaying
| strong ethics in the face of adversity (losing a job albeit a
| fake one pays real $$). Trending on HN first page will open a
| world of new opportunities. Good luck.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I wonder how many people in your position smell something
| rotten, but instead of trying to contact the "real Connor" just
| delete/ignore all the messages because they don't want to be
| part of even a bigger scam. (What if everyone is in on it, and
| they're trying to scam you somehow?).
| Naracion wrote:
| Recount _this_ story during the social / break between
| interviews if you ever get an onsite. :D
| kodah wrote:
| Shout out to you for wading through the literal torrent of
| bullshit without the foresight of a blog post to expose context
| and with little professional experience to help inform you.
| You'll be a great asset to the industry but it can take a
| minute to find your footing. Be persistent and definitely keep
| this story around for beer Friday.
| robswc wrote:
| I know it probably feels a bit hopeless now but trust me.
|
| If you learn to build things, provide value, you will have 100s
| of recruiters reaching out to you and you will mostly be
| rejecting offers for a change :)
|
| I have no doubt reading about you and seeing this comment in a
| few years you will be more than set!
| intelVISA wrote:
| The biggest red flag is a senior engineer role paying $80hr!
| moralestapia wrote:
| Too low? Too high?
| cpfohl wrote:
| Low. Much too low. Going rate starts in the low 100s and
| has no super hard cap.
|
| 80/hr overseas, or in less urban parts of the US is pretty
| standard. I'd question the reason for staying, though,
| since finding higher paying remote work is pretty easy
| these days...
| viridian wrote:
| $80 an hour is a salary of $166,400
| boomskats wrote:
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| > my girlfriend tells me, "you're good but let's be honest
| here..."
|
| My favorite part of this whole thing. Hang onto her.
| blastwind wrote:
| Haha yes. She's honest and the best.
| dmoy wrote:
| > In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over
| a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.
|
| Ah haha I hate that question
|
| It should be banned everywhere, oh well.
|
| I once saw a physicist (not even a coder) give a really cool
| answer to it though, I wish I could remember it.
| bqe wrote:
| I remember being asked this during my interview at Google. It
| was the first time I heard it and I gave an answer that
| iterated over the list twice. The interviewer said that it
| wasn't good enough and I am only allowed to iterate over it
| once. He didn't let me write my O(2n) solution down so he
| returned a strong no as feedback.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| They had me do the same problem at Amazon too.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| This type of interviewing style is bullshit. It means the
| interviewer knows a better solution that is "clever" and
| expects you to either have the same cleverness epiphany on
| the spot or to have studied this question. Neither is
| actually very useful as a hiring criterion.
|
| Guy Steele gave an _incredibly_ interesting guest talk[1]
| at google about four different ways to solve this exact
| problem, and the fact that it 's an interesting enough
| topic for an hour long google talk should probably be a
| clue that you shouldn't be expected to invent the best
| solution on the whiteboard in 40 minutes.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftcIcn8AmSY
| google234123 wrote:
| this could be a good question. There's nothing wrong with
| a candidate giving some less effluent answer and then
| progressing up to a better solution with some small hints
| or discussions
| weard_beard wrote:
| Effluent is poop
| vertis wrote:
| It should be a "more effluent" answer and then working up
| to less effluent :)
| weard_beard wrote:
| I think they were mathematically correct.
|
| Affluent + Eloquent = Bullshit
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Thanks for the link, that made for entertaining watching!
|
| Curious that he gave that talk about parallelism in the
| end of 2015, and talked about how we'll engineer more
| systems to enable parallelism.
|
| First question at the end was actually whether we can get
| this into existing languages because new languages are
| "notoriously hard to get accepted."
|
| I'm currently learning Rust and now I'm wondering how the
| iterator map() and other "accumulation style" functions
| are implemented and whether there's a way to make these
| parallel, since the map() call treats things
| independently and a sum() could be done in the proposed
| tree style way.
|
| Guess I have a piece of code to look up in the standard
| library :)
| ehsanu1 wrote:
| Not sure if there's anything in the standard library, but
| I recall this as the definitive library for data
| parallelism in Rust: https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Guy Steele's talk came up here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30462835 with an APL
| solution of:
| +/(([?][?]\[?]a)[?][?]\a)-a
|
| with comment that it could "be fully parallelizable and
| run fast on the GPU, as it's based on a couple scan
| (generalized prefix sum) operations". Some explanation in
| my reply there.
| jll29 wrote:
| I have interviewed hundreds of scientists-engineers-
| developers, and I never use esoteric quiz questions or
| logic riddles.
|
| I want to screen people for the skills that they will
| really need in their daily lives, so that's where I draw
| my pool of questions from. For example, processing data
| in the most simple ways (sorting, searching, extracting)
| quickly reveals if the candidates have actually _done_
| what they claim they did. You'd be surprised how many
| Oxford PhDs struggle to write done a pipeline for
| extracting a simple word frequency list.
|
| Now you might say "Maybe they're Windows people, or
| prefer Python." and my response is "I don't mind what
| tools you use - but you need to demonstrate that you can
| solve easy/common tasks on the spot, without wasting have
| a calendar day to re-invent the wheel."
| lupire wrote:
| He probably got chastised for poor interviewing in Feedback
| on Feedback.
| google234123 wrote:
| That almost never happens.
| spennant wrote:
| It happens... I've chastised an interviewer before. Their
| job was to identify: 1) Can the candidate do the job? 2)
| Will the candidate do the job? 3) Will the candidate work
| well the team?
|
| Their job was not to emulate FAANG, intimidate the
| candidate, or see if the candidate studied Leetcode.
| jaffee wrote:
| Andrew, see if anything here catches your eye... we've got a
| few openings. You can email me at my username at
| featurebase.com.
|
| https://www.featurebase.com/careers
| tomcam wrote:
| Damnit with all these job offers dropping into Andrew's inbox
| I definitely need someone to clone me so I can be all ethical
| and shit
|
| * Kidding I'm retired. Mad props, Andrew!
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| BTW, why are you applying just for internships? I checked out
| your (non-forked) github repos and you're definitely better
| than I was as an intern. It's not senior engineer level, but
| you could definitely go for at least a junior eng position for
| sure. God knows we hire much worse junior FE engineers than
| that. Or are you interviewing for FAANG(-like) positions only?
|
| edit: small tip though, I would rename the App2.js etc. files
| to something else, having multiple files named the same but
| with a number difference says a lot about experience level.
|
| also: do not use regex for parsing XML
| (https://github.com/BlastWind/xml-leaf-
| highlighter/blob/main/...). That is also a common newbie
| mistake
|
| I hope this doesn't come across as patronizing, I didn't mean
| it so.
| cdkmoose wrote:
| regex is overrated, real programmers parse XML with bash.
|
| #sarcasm #seenitinthewild
| gumby wrote:
| My kid chose this approach. He had a mix of startup and
| bigger (not mega-) company experience and chose FAANG
| internship because they have the infrastructure to make an
| internship productive. This was from some advice he received.
|
| By "infrastructure" it's not just code (CI, tools, etc) but
| personnel, how they come up with projects, etc. New grads or
| still-undergrads may have a lot of programming experience but
| none on working as part of a team.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > By "infrastructure" it's not just code (CI, tools, etc)
| but personnel, how they come up with projects, etc. New
| grads or still-undergrads may have a lot of programming
| experience but none on working as part of a team.
|
| Fully agreed, the code part of the job is really only 20%.
| The rest is learning to do so in a team and business
| environment, which is actually much harder than
| programming.
|
| I learned this in a startup however and would definitely
| recommend it to others. You learn less "the correct
| approach", but more or less get shoved into doing bigger
| things earlier since all the big guns are focused on some
| ungodly hard problem. So all the medium-hard problems get
| shoved to the juniors and interns. It's not the healthiest
| environment sure (I was doing 40hr/wks as part-time
| frequently), but if you can survive in it for a while you
| gain tenacity and a lot of skills that are hard to normally
| deepen until later.
| thwayunion wrote:
| I've supervised a ton of internships, and was an academic
| before that.
|
| The success of internships is largely preordained by the
| quality of the mentor. Specifically: careful project
| selection, good advising particularly in the first few
| weeks, and political/social capital to translate
| internships into offers (both at the company and
| elsewhere). Interns can screw things up, and in rare cases
| heroically rescue an internship, but the liklihood of a
| good outcome for the average intern is often preordained.
|
| So the real advice is to find an excellent mentor. But
| that's really hard because you rarely know who the mentor
| is when applying. In lieu of better information, FAANGs and
| Better-than-FAANG (eg Jane Street) are a good proxy because
| they disproportionately pull individual contributors with
| significant experience mentoring juniors: PhDs, people who
| TA'd during undergraduate, etc.
| blastwind wrote:
| Ha! You're good. I'm still in uni, so I am interviewing for
| internships (mainly for big tech companies right now since I
| had a taste at a IoT startup last year). Perhaps I am
| underestimating myself, but I'm in no rush.
|
| Thank you reminding me about that diagramming and xml-parsing
| repos. Regarding the diagramming repo, that was honestly some
| of worst code I've written (2000 lined React class with 15
| states). It's so bad that I put a warning in the repo and
| haven't gone back to it since. And regarding the xml parsing
| repo, wow, you really looked carefully! I however added a
| funny warning regarding this in the readme
| (https://github.com/BlastWind/xml-leaf-highlighter#design-
| dec...). I wanted to use regex since it was just a school
| project. Going to add an additional warning, thanks.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Good luck Andrew, keep building and you'll go far w/ your
| attitude & soft skills
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| All the luck to you! You seem to have all the qualities
| needed to succeed in our industry, and some on top: not
| many engineers are this good at speaking. If you can
| wrestle with the technical problems well enough you'll find
| soft skills to be such a force multiplier it's ridiculous.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > also: do not use regex for parsing XML
|
| HE COMES! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-
| match-open...
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Is it bad that I know at "SO: HE COMES!"?
| underdeserver wrote:
| I will never not upvote this link.
| unwind wrote:
| That is truly a piece of modern techno art, appreciated by
| a choice few (that'd be us). Thanks for reminding me. Also,
| pro tip to people who haven't seen it: the "best" answer is
| not at the top, so remember to scroll down. :)
| bigbluedots wrote:
| Hadn't seen that post before and it's fantastic! Thanks for
| linking
| sph wrote:
| I always come back for "One whose Name cannot be expressed
| in the Basic Multilingual Plane"
| tomrod wrote:
| Andrew, mad respect on your integrity and navigating an ethics
| situation one would expect to read about in a college study.
| pjbeam wrote:
| Email me at my HN username at protonmail dot com for a referral
| to Dropbox's internship. Love the integrity and drive to get to
| the bottom of a strange situation.
| jxi wrote:
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| There ya go, looks like a gained opportunity there!
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Not just for Andrew, but the identity thieves too!
|
| If anyone needs a Westerner to interview as "Andrew", hit
| me up. I've got a hot lead on an internship at Dropbox!
| pjbeam wrote:
| My plan is to verify it is the same email at least
| through OP, although your point is valid.
| atmosx wrote:
| Shoutout to you sir for being honest and reaching out your
| fellow peer!!! I am sure you will have a great career and now
| you have an epic story to tell over beers with friends!
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Andrew - you the sort of person I would love to have on my
| team. Alas I more hardware engineering than software. I hope
| the community here can give you some good leads and tips.
|
| Karma should be that ethics works.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| Hey Andrew, I am sure your integrity in this situation will be
| rightfully rewarded. You come across as a great hire not just
| in the matter of integrity, but also in the humble/honest
| description of your skill level and experience. I can see you
| finding that internship entirely on your own, by simply walking
| into the next interview confident of how valuable someone like
| you would be to any organization.
| blastwind wrote:
| Messages are only editable within 2 hrs so I write another
| message expressing my additional thoughts and thanks:
|
| As important as having integrity is a community that
| prioritizes and fosters integrity. The HN community skipped the
| fostering part and went straight to giving me referrals and
| interviews. I'm grateful, and I'll carry on the spirit when I'm
| in the position to do so. The opportunities I've derived are
| nothing but amazing, but the most important thing I've learned
| is to internalize integrity as one of my greatest strengths: In
| the face of adversity and unfairness, I'll stand up for myself
| and others.
|
| Also, thanks for those telling me internship finding is going
| to get better. I am not pessimistic about it at all, but I was
| trying to be funny by "impersonating" the previous top comment,
| it fits the theme. I find myself maniacally focused when
| practice algorithms, and I enjoy focusing.
|
| This whole time of writing this I have that one scene from
| Scent of A Woman repeating in my head: "And I have seen boys
| like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs
| ripped off. But there isn't nothin' like the sight of an
| amputated spirit; there is no prosthetic for that."
| blastwind wrote:
| I'm grateful for all of the opportunities! Thank you everyone.
| imron wrote:
| I suspect you're about to get a ton of legitimate interviews
| and will be able to pick from the best of them.
|
| Strong ethics, and this lesson on their importance, will
| serve you well your entire career.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| > I then learned this was a interviewee discovered through Upwork
|
| People trying to get cheap labor and instead get defrauded.
|
| I feel bad for Connor though.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| This is amazing. I wanted to add one thing. I noticed after
| reading the full blog post, and scanning through all the HN
| comments here, that there has been actually no mention, as far as
| I can tell, from any parties involved, or even any commenters, of
| any intention to make a police report.
|
| Now, I understand not trusting the police, and often it's more
| trouble than it's worth to deal with them. But this is a
| situation involving identity theft, which is a very serious
| crime. I realized that this is an international situation and the
| local police probably cannot do much, but at some level of
| policing, be it the FBI or even at the international level, this
| feels like something that should be reported. Even if nothing can
| be done, in the worst case it's useful that the police be made
| aware of new trends in identity theft; in the best case, they
| will be caught. These people are _organized_ to perform identity
| theft, which is literally organized crime -- I hope they are
| aware of the risk they are taking doing this.
|
| Lastly, unrelated to the above, but just a random social aspect
| of this; it's clearly an interesting and unexpected result of
| location-based pay. The only reason I can think of that a group
| of people would organize something like this is because
| pretending to be native English speakers and presumably
| pretending to be US- or Europe-based will automatically get them
| a higher pay scale. (If I understand correctly, they are possibly
| a team of programmers in some other country, and _are_ offering
| to actually do the work, but just pretending to be other people
| while doing it in order to get a higher paycheck.) Not making any
| judgement here regarding location-based pay, although that 's an
| interesting discussion for another thread, but in today's remote
| work environment, new kinds of fraud are definitely an
| interesting consequence to be on the lookout for. Fascinating,
| and dangerous.
| entwife wrote:
| I was going to comment about a police report, but largely
| because it might be useful for an insurance policy that covers
| identity theft.
| braingenious wrote:
| >These people are organized to perform identity theft, which is
| literally organized crime
|
| This seems hyperbolic (though not impossible.)
|
| If I were to attempt this scheme, would I have created an
| organized crime entity?
|
| I think this whole thing is a novel example of grift, which is
| by definition bad. The idea of every bad act being turned into
| an excuse to necessitate federal police action is... weird.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| You don't think this is a crime?
|
| I mean, IANAL but I'm pretty sure taking in income while
| posing as someone else must constitute a crime.
|
| If not, lesson learned I guess. (Don't know unless you talk
| to a lawyer or try to report it.) But if it is a crime, then
| yes, it's across state and national boundaries, so who else
| would have jurisdiction but federal police?
| jstarfish wrote:
| You vastly overestimate the degree to which the police give a
| shit. Unless there's an actual financial loss or threat to
| life, they don't care. This barely qualifies as identity theft
| anyway; it's _attempted_ fraud.
|
| They won't take a report of your phone number being spoofed,
| but they'll deploy SWAT teams to unsuspecting houses at the
| word of bored teenagers.
|
| Do you know the imposter's actual identity? What would you even
| report? If the perpetrator is international, what are your
| local police even supposed to do with this information?
|
| You might have a little better luck with the FBI, but if you
| don't show up with hard evidence (i.e. do all the work for
| them), you won't get anywhere with them either.
|
| All of this goes to show you why this sort of scheme remains
| successful. Nobody cares. Fraud is just an assumed risk.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I understand. But you don't really know if you don't even try
| to report it. And on this case.. I mean, this has to do with
| taking in income while posing as someone else, which
| ultimately affects the IRS, so I suspect there might be more
| interest at the FBI level than you think.
|
| But who knows. I'd be curious to know how common this is / is
| becoming. It's certainly novel to me.
| viridian wrote:
| I really doubt they care, the juice just isn't worth the
| squeeze for them. Its an incredibly difficult crime to
| prosecute for, even if the people were operating in the US,
| which they almost certainly are not. They really only care
| about the highest of high people cyber crimes (silkroad,
| anontalk, lulzsec, etc), because it takes a dozen or more
| agents months to years to resolve a single one.
|
| Generally when it comes to this sort of stuff, if you cant
| hand them all the evidence with a bow on it, they don't
| care unless it involves an imminent terror attack, or major
| drug/CSAM ring. This doesn't just apply to us average joes
| either, every cop I know (so, 3) who has ever tried to pass
| something they viewed as important to the feds, has been
| stiff armed and told that it's not a priority.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, the police are definitely the wrong group, as their
| jurisdiction is just local or state, and almost none would
| have much a clue of how to proceed.
|
| However, the FBI might be _very_ interested. While these
| situations may be just be a couple of friends scamming, it
| could also be the tip of the iceberg of an organized crime
| operation or an espionage operation. Many countries are
| actively working to get inside American corporations to steal
| both their technology and anything related to any govt work
| and secrets. There is not much better way to gain access to
| the network than to be able to login as an employee.
|
| Even if that one case alone isn't that interesting to them,
| having the data may very well help crack a much more
| important NatSec case. Gather the info and report it.
| blitzar wrote:
| Like all scams and spam, if it didnt work then people wouldnt do
| it. But I am struggling to see how it will work.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Sometimes just the possibility of it working, and the person's
| desperation, will cause them to try it. I've heard enough
| instances of people paying others to take exams for them that
| it doesn't surprise me that some people trying to do an
| interview that way, too. They think just getting the job will
| do something for them, and (for whatever reason) think they'll
| be able to keep the job once they have it.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these people think they
| have high-level skills, but some other factor is preventing
| them from getting the job. Sometimes it might even be true, but
| I'm better against them having the skill level they think they
| do.
| chx wrote:
| > I've heard enough instances of people paying others to take
| exams for them
|
| Back in the 90s I was becoming a math teacher at one
| university while I was working on getting admitted into an IT
| engineer course at another. Strangely enough, the other
| admittance exam besides math was physics and I sucked at that
| while obviously I was far ahead in math compared to my peers
| at the physics preparation course. So someone offered an
| astonishing amount of money to take the math entrance exam
| for them, enough to buy a small apartment with it -- and
| perhaps I would've been young and foolish enough to go with
| it except for one fact: they offered a falsified national id
| to go with it. That's five years in prison if you get caught
| with it and I noped the hell out of it...
|
| In the case OP describes, the situation is similar: it's the
| documentation that catches you.
| llsf wrote:
| This bring back memories and PTSD... Mine went so far that I
| cannot talk about it, as it nearly touch my very existence.
| Identity usurpation can go deep, down to the root certificate.
| coldcode wrote:
| I think this is probably more common than we might think. Given
| remote work being preferred lately, this is probably doable,
| especially if companies are hiring large numbers of random
| contractors. I know my old team members (I retired recently) have
| gone through a ton of remote contractors recently, many of whom
| were completely useless. Thankfully I only hired people before
| Covid hit, and at that point everyone was required to work in
| office (at least for the work I was responsible for). Everyone I
| did take on was either excellent or at least competant. I did
| hire most of them off of phone interviews only, so maybe I was
| lucky.
|
| If an experienced person does the interviewing asking the right
| questions / requiring tests / etc might be insufficient to
| realize the person you are interviewing is not the person who
| will do the work. I wonder how you would catch this before
| actually having the "worker" start.
|
| I guess this is a downside of all remote work assuming your
| company is less than thorough in checking
| references/documents/etc.
| seydor wrote:
| And how do we know the author is not pretending to be him?
| genericacct wrote:
| I've had the reverse experience on upwork: the client is asking
| for bids on a project but when you google their name and location
| it turns out they're in jail. When we had a zoom call their name
| was different.. I'll have to cancel the project i guess.
| Maursault wrote:
| > We are not an adult company.
|
| What are the chances its children behind this, maybe even
| American children lying about why they need a stooge? It would
| explain why they're not concerned about violating federal law,
| whatever else, I think also US Code Title 18 Section 241,
| Conspiracy Against Rights (a wild guess, iinal).
| yarg wrote:
| That's made me think.
|
| Why the hell don't software developers have their own chain of
| trust?
|
| (Well, professionals in general, but you'd think that we'd have
| gotten this shit working for ourselves first.)
|
| It would kinda fix this shit - at least to the extent that it was
| actually used.
|
| So then all you need to do is have "Company X" adopt the policy
| that all of their people must be connected to the trust chain.
|
| From then on "A" of "Company X" fame can no longer be
| impersonated (except via theft of keys).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Why the hell don 't software developers have their own chain
| of trust?_
|
| Is it a bird?
|
| Is it a plane?
|
| No, it's _BLOCKCHAIN_!
|
| This actually sounds like a possibility legit application for
| distributed ledger.
| yarg wrote:
| I'd rather use a distributed DAG than a distributed linked-
| list.
|
| But yeah, that's a decent use for the ledger.
| peppertree wrote:
| Scam is rampant on LinkedIn. I'm getting constant connection
| requests from obviously fake profiles with AI generated faces.
| kube-system wrote:
| And they all have 500+ connections. Bet they're scraping
| profiles or some crap.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| The connections are also bots.
| cynusx wrote:
| Same here. I just ignore devs that apply directly to me on
| linkedin, I would be surprised if any of them were real or not
| an agency.
| earleybird wrote:
| "connortumbleson.com refused to connect" - HN HoD?
| mrandypratt37 wrote:
| I'm a US-based accountant who is currently interviewing for his
| first job in software and I was approached by someone on on
| LinkedIn about an opportunity. Seemed fishy, but figured I could
| risk 15 minutes. The person set up a meeting between me and a
| Taiwanese Developer for this exact thing. He said he had 7 years
| experience and had a contract drafted for he and I to become
| "business partner" where I would take the meetings and he would
| do the work for a 30/70 split. I told him, morals aside, that I
| didn't have the credentials to get into the jobs he would want
| and pointed out numerous obvious issues like in-person coding,
| etc.. He said he was ready to make a fake LinkedIn and had this
| whole operation planned out.
|
| Seems to me like there is a whole operation around this business
| model of exploiting US developer salaries and the morality of a
| few Americans willing to try and make a dollar for free. Honestly
| more disappointed in the people accepting shady deals like this
| than the ones offering them.
| datavirtue wrote:
| We blew "morals" out the air lock long ago. Not to mention,
| morals are subjective.
|
| I don't understand why corporations are not embracing and
| encouraging such arrangements.
| dont__panic wrote:
| If I can play devil's advocate for a moment...
|
| if the company gets decent work, the non-US participant gets
| better (and fairer, globally) pay compared to what they'd get
| locally, and the US participant takes care of the "soft" side
| of the operation... who's getting hurt?
|
| I can't deny that something smells skeevy about this and I
| don't think I could ever trust a random foreign developer who I
| haven't built up a solid relationship with to execute reliably
| "as me" in the coding side of a role. But if I had a good
| friend from college who couldn't get a VISA to the US? I dunno,
| I might be tempted to collaborate. If everybody wins, I'm not
| sure it's inherently bad. But maybe I'm missing something.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think that the key point is, this kind of thing _is_ legit,
| if you are honest about what's happening. The dev is foreign,
| we have a local project manager to handle communications.
| This is not uncommon. If you are a foreign programmer
| actually able to program, this is how you would do it.
|
| If you DON'T do it this way, but instead get an actor to play
| a local dev, then it is because you cannot actually program,
| and therefore need to borrow someone else's identity to get
| contracts.
| f1shy wrote:
| Is not this, more or less, what all consulting companies do?
| Take 30% and let someone else do the job?
| girvo wrote:
| It's the impersonation of real people that is the danger
| here. If they were generating fake people, then perhaps it
| might not be so bad, but as it stands there is legal,
| reputational, and possible other types of damage at risk to
| the people being impersonated
| shagie wrote:
| Say you do it... the company pays you $100/h (making up a
| number to do math) and $70 of that goes to the person who
| does the job while you keep $30 of it.
|
| Guess how much gets reported to the IRS that you're making
| and how much taxes you'll owe on that $100/h.
|
| Next there's the fraudulent representation of who is doing
| the work to the client.
|
| Lastly, there's the "this is a form of money laundering" and
| you're taking a significant role.
|
| When this starts to unravel, you're not going to come out
| ahead.
| yardstick wrote:
| I'm not in the US, and playing devils advocate here: but
| don't most employers withhold tax at source before paying
| to the employees? Ie your 30/70 cut would be net after tax.
|
| Or if it was a contracting scenario, wouldn't the US person
| be able to claim the 70/hr as an expense against taxes?
| Since wages are a valid business expense if you are
| outsourcing.
|
| I use the term wages loosely here. The IRS does not
| consider wages/salary performed by people fully living
| outside the US (except US citizens) as wages within the US
| tax system, and so is not taxed by the US.
|
| So it really comes down to how the agreements between
| parties are structured.
| shagie wrote:
| If you are a contractor, you are likely doing your own
| taxes. If you are a FTE (Full Time Employee) the approach
| of "sub contract it out" gets you in _much_ more trouble.
|
| As a contractor, the company tells the government "we
| paid John $200,000 for work at $100/hour and 2000 hours"
| and then the government comes to you and says "You were
| paid $200,000 and the federal tax on that is $40,811"
| (and the state comes and says that their rate will be
| another $15,000).
|
| If you are acting as a contracting company rather than an
| individual, then the company wouldn't have said "we paid
| John" but rather "we paid JohnCorp" as the business to
| business invoicing is different than working as a
| contractor.
|
| You sent the money out of the country - the IRS doesn't
| care too much about that. You got paid $100/hour, that's
| the end of the story from the IRS's perspective as an
| individual filing.
|
| In the examples given in this thread it is about an
| individual farming off some (or all) of the work to
| another person and presenting the work as their own to
| the company. This is a different arrangement than a "I am
| the liaison / representative for a team of people who
| work cheaply for me."
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Everybody wins until the tax man comes knocking for all of
| the dollars owed, or when "Connor Tumbleson" gets flagged as
| a terrible employee when all those copy-pasted qualifications
| don't line up with reality and the work is mediocre. As
| reported elsewhere in these threads, the credentials and
| interview process are all worked out upfront, the interview
| no long becomes a valid test of qualifications for the
| position.
|
| This entire scam can be done entirely legally by
| subcontracting the work to your foreign friend, if your
| clients allow for that; if the end result is of decent enough
| quality then I don't see why they wouldn't. You'd be on the
| hook if they mess up, but the same is true when you lie to
| your friend's employers.
|
| However, these people choose not to go the legal route,
| instead relying on lies and fraud. They go as far as to hire
| others to do part of their lying just to get into a company.
|
| Personally, I'd call the authorities the moment I'd find out
| an employee of mine has been lying about their qualifications
| and experience from the very first day to fake it through the
| interview. You cannot trust someone whose entire career is
| built on top of lies, or someone who actively enables such
| behaviour.
|
| I'm not sure if these people are a small step up from the
| call center scammers because at least they deliver something
| or a small step down because they're supposedly capable
| enough to do better. I'm sympathetic to the third world
| programmers that have the capabilities to earn some of the
| absolutely insane wages American programmers get paid, but I
| completely oppose the large-scale fraud these lying-as-a-
| service middlemen employ to make money.
| verall wrote:
| > Personally, I'd call the authorities
|
| What, are the local cops going to arrest them? For what?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| IANAL, but it'll be the Feds. Wire fraud. Ultimately
| somebody pays some money. It's across state lines. And it
| was done fraudulently. It will be the US person that gets
| hit for it.
| alexanderh wrote:
| >I'm not sure if these people are a small step up from the
| call center scammers because at least they deliver
| something or a small step down because they're supposedly
| capable enough to do better.
|
| This is what I don't understand.... They have the skills
| (supposedly).. I mean sure, if they are foreign developers
| they wont always be getting the best pay or opportunities
| in their own country... But I have never seen a startup shy
| away from hiring foreign development teams in the past, so
| long as they do good work. I have a hard time believing
| they are competent enough to do good work, but with a
| complete lack of valid, legal and morally sound
| opportunities.
|
| I also have such a hard time believing this type of fraud
| is actually all that profitable or pans out successfully
| often enough to make it worth it... Are companies really
| doing that little due diligence?
|
| On the flip side, I also hate that the interview process
| for valid candidates is turning into a 3 ring circus of
| hoop jumping because of scams like this. Companies really
| need to find the right balance between due diligence and
| not making interviews absolutely absurd and insulting.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Could be competent but do a shit job at 3-4 places at
| once, wait for the onboarding to end and move on to the
| next target, then let the US counterpart deal with the
| fallout. Sounds like decent money for not a lot of work
| if you can swindle enough candidates.
|
| And also let's face it - you can get away with 1/3
| effective work time in most places - especially if you
| have someone making excuses, socializing, attending this-
| should-have-been-an-email meetings for you full time -
| and for a 30% cut.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > They have the skills (supposedly)..
|
| But they are not accountable. If things go bad it does
| not affect their reputation since their id is fake.
|
| They could be criminals who want to plant malware into
| your product. Or steal your passwords. Since they're
| working under false id in another part of the world it's
| hard to arrest them.
|
| Employers are willing to pay a bigger salary if they
| think they have someone in the same country under same
| jurisdiction.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| What do you think the likelihood that they have skills
| actually is? If this was just "I have poor english
| language skills" then they could at least point companies
| at their real portfolio of code. And somebody who has
| poor enough english skills that they need to hire a fake
| interviewee is not going to be able to write effective
| documentation or communicate with the contracting company
| when requirements change or need to be clarified.
| mirkules wrote:
| I'm kind of at a loss that these propositions would be taken
| at face value. Imagine for a moment that these "talented web
| developer groups" whom you are essentially representing with
| your name attached to them are bad foreign state actors in
| disguise. Imagine what would happen to you if some malicious
| piece of code made it on some website processing personal
| information, payments, or worse. It's eye-opening and really
| terrifying people don't even consider this possibility, in
| 2022.
| lazide wrote:
| It's generally all the OTHER details that people conveniently
| skim over in these descriptions that get people hurt, or the
| less obvious exposure to unexpected risks for the
| counterparty.
|
| As a (pretty common) comparison - if a gay man marries a
| woman, has kids, does the whole couple thing and blends in,
| but periodically goes to clubs or gay bars, or has a
| boyfriend on the side, who are they really hurting?
|
| What about the equivalent straight man with a mistress on the
| side? Or two? Or the woman with a side man?
|
| Well, as long as everything goes perfect, I guess just
| themselves by pretending to be someone they aren't most of
| their lives and having to lie to everyone every day. And
| certainly the cards have been stacked against them in a great
| number of societies and environments (to the point of death
| penalties in some cases if they don't hide), so it's hard to
| blame them for _hiding_ doing it in those situations if they
| really can 't stop.
|
| But it almost never just goes perfectly forever does it?
| Eventually, either someone finds out (and now they're exposed
| to blackmail risk, or a bitter divorce and lots of bad
| publicity), or someone gets sick with something they
| shouldn't have been able to, or pregnant, or whatever. There
| were a decent number of counterparties in supposedly
| monogamous relationships over the years that have gotten
| diseases they should not have been able to get, including
| HIV, from this type of stuff. It can trigger severe emotional
| trauma in people. Folks get killed over this kind of thing
| somewhat frequently.
|
| From a corporate equivalent, think - traceable customer
| information leak. Or attackers get control of the corporate
| network through a hidden VPN endpoint configured to allow
| these contractors in to do things, and do things from crypto-
| ransom the company to outright rob the company blind.
|
| An acquaintance at a company I only briefly worked at years
| ago got busted for siphoning MILLIONS of dollars through
| phony affiliates he'd setup at the company. He was in charge
| of the affiliate program. I never cared for him, and wasn't
| particularly surprised, and was part of the reason I left
| once I saw what I had gotten myself into, but it was a good
| cautionary tale.
|
| The company had been really happy with overall performance,
| they just hadn't noticed the extra 'tax' they were paying him
| until he did something else sketchy and they started looking
| closer.
|
| The reason to avoid doing sketchy things, is because they
| inevitably have hidden costs, from cognitive overhead from
| constantly tracking all the lies, to real risks of extreme
| bad problems that others are being exposed to. It's often
| lucrative enough however, that there is always the
| temptation.
|
| It's why 'sunshine is the best disinfectant' is still so
| true.
|
| After all, generally if everyone was actually comfortable
| with it and it's side effects, there would be no need to be
| sketchy about it.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Apart from the identity fraud and the issue of trusting a
| random person you don't know, the situation sounds similar to
| an outsourcing company. As a developer you are in a good
| position to evaluate other developers on their skills too.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| There's a related scheme that I've seriously considered a
| time or two.
|
| I'm a pretty good software engineer, and they pay me very
| well, but I've got absolute shit executive functioning
| skills. Task management, remembering to email people back,
| and the like are challenging to me. It has occurred to me
| that a full time personal assistant in my area typically
| makes about $50,000/year. I think there's a decent chance
| that, with such a support, my own salary could go up by $200k
| or more over the next couple of years. I've frequently
| entertained the notion of hiring someone to basically support
| me in my job without telling my employer, since there's zero
| chance they'd get me such an assistant and similarly zero
| chance they'd let me pay for my own.
|
| I wouldn't ultimately do it because, y'know, all the
| dishonesty involved, but it'd probably be a good deal for
| everybody involved. My employer gets better work for the same
| money, my assistant gets stable work, and I get promoted.
| AdrianEGraphene wrote:
| You could get a full time assistant for less than
| $12k/year.[1] Not sure if they work with individuals, but
| I've used them for my startup.
|
| I'm sure you'd be able to use this.
|
| Not sure if it's dishonesty rather than just wise resource
| planning?
|
| [1] https://wingassistant.com/
| cxr wrote:
| Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization.
|
| <https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-05-05-delegation-is-the-
| corne...>
| brysonreece wrote:
| From the perspective of the company, there's immediate
| concerns around sensitive information, intellectual property,
| corporate/government espionage -- none of which seem unlikely
| in positions premised on flexible morals.
|
| IMO if there were registered/regulated, established services
| that filled this need and handled the VISA/background check
| process then I wonder if companies might be willing to work
| with overseas developers more.
| thewebcount wrote:
| > who's getting hurt?
|
| The person being impersonated. Someone is out there
| pretending to be them. This person is known to be willing to
| do unethical things. (Who knows, maybe they're also
| infiltrating the client's network and stealing data,
| installing ransomware, etc.?) Furthermore, how does the
| person in the US pretending to be the developer get paid? Do
| they actually get paid, or is that a scam, too? At any point
| does someone write a check to fake developer in their name?
| Does the IRS see that? Is the real developer now on the hook
| for taxes on that? There are numerous things that could go
| wrong and hurt the developer being impersonated, the person
| doing the impersonation, and the client.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > Does the IRS see that?
|
| This is my concern here. Sounds like a new worse version of
| identity theft.
|
| The most powerful players are not part of the con but they
| benifit from it. The gov gets its taxes. The corporation
| gets a worker that does the job.
|
| In cases like these where the victim is only indirectly
| robbed the powers that be are not very responsive. Double
| so when the enforcer (IRS) is also indirectly benefiting
| from the crime by having your taxable income jacked from
| 23% to 37% because there are several people with real jobs
| working under your name.
|
| I already feel bad for the first people to have to deal
| with this legal situation. It will take years for the IRS
| to wake up and do something about it. Meanwhile their lives
| will be wrecked.
|
| The worst part might be that no one will really care. Since
| this is targeting tech workers that are by many considered
| to be privileged and over compensated. People will just
| sarcastically say things like boo whoo did you get over
| taxed, you'll find a way to deal with it.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Good points about the person being impersonated subject to
| (completely involuntary) risks. I probably should have
| phrased my question to specifically ask about situations
| where the impersonated is involved and asked to participate
| in the scheme. I would agree that it's not OK to just...
| start using someone else's identity without permission.
|
| In sibling comments, some other great points were made
| about the risk profile for the company if you do this
| without their knowledge. I'm less convinced that I should
| care about risk towards the company, but from a legal
| standpoint it probably holds up.
| 2fast4you wrote:
| I was approached on LinkedIn for a similar reason. It never
| went farther than LinkedIn because I was sketched out
| mapmeld wrote:
| Bizarre. I (US-based engineer with an Upwork account) was invited
| into a less sophisticated variant of the scam in spring 2021:
|
| > Nice to meet you. I am looking for a US person who do business
| with me. You can earn money with a few cooperation. Do you know
| Upwork or Toptal site?
|
| They also had the text of the message in a GitHub repo. I tried
| reporting them to GitHub, Upwork, and Toptal, but I don't think
| they knew what to do with it? I assumed my scammer was looking to
| evade banking rules or sanctions, but it could be for either fake
| employment or actual work with a US-based persona like in this
| case.
| bogwog wrote:
| Same, although I was never asked to impersonate anybody. They
| just wanted to work using my real name/identity, and would
| throw some money my way every month. At the time I was
| annoyed/pissed, but after reading this I respect that they at
| least had the decency to ask for my permission lol.
|
| Honestly, this is 100% Upwork's fault. Their platform is a race
| to the bottom, yet they make it very difficult/impossible for
| people from countries that can actually afford to make a living
| with those rates to sign up. So I understand why people resort
| to this behavior, even though I would never want to work with
| someone who would actually do that. Fuck those people.
| dvykhopen wrote:
| I run a job platform. This scam is pervasive, especially with
| contract work. We've had to get really good at recognizing
| patterns because their covers are really good (even faking
| passports and work history).
|
| Many of the big contract platforms are dealing with this too.
| Hiring managers are getting tired of it and are 1) not hiring as
| many contract workers and 2) not using platforms to hire those
| workers.
|
| Unfortunately, this hurts small companies more since their hiring
| practices are so lax and there's a crop of new ones every few
| months.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _We 've had to get really good at recognizing patterns
| because their covers are really good (even faking passports and
| work history)._
|
| I'm pretty sure that can get you into super duper extra trouble
| with the State Department.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Who's going to report it? It would take forever and use op
| even more of your time. Better to get good at filtering.
| xiaodai wrote:
| He looks a like a loser. Not u. I am him or her.
|
| U know what I mean
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Creepy. With recruiters you can expect anything but a zoom call
| with an unexpecting client. That is new for me.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I just realized this could really open up some great
| possibilities.
|
| Any project associated with me that went well, I'll definitely be
| claiming credit for.
|
| Any project that went poorly.. that's clearly the impostor.
|
| Thanks other selves for building my CV! So this is how you get 10
| years of experience in 2 year old tech
| karaterobot wrote:
| Let's say that this happens with some regularity: an imposter is
| hired to take an interview on behalf of a third party who is
| obviously not the same person. Let's say that, some of the time,
| this ploy is successful and the third party is hired for the
| position. Don't they just get fired immediately? Is this entire
| scam just about getting a couple day's salary? Or do some
| employers just shrug and go with the flow?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| These scams have been happening for decades. It's as hilarious as
| infuriating when somebody shows up to a job site and it's
| _clearly_ not the person that was interviewed.
| ollien wrote:
| What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame
| is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and
| ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college
| student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are
| they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied
| about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview
| on their own.
|
| Something's not adding up
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Maintaining is not the goal. Say you get a job that pays senior
| engineer money, and they fire you after maybe three weeks of
| you just saying "it depends" and pretending your connection is
| bad. You still made like $5,000. And you're probably running
| more than one of these scams at a time. And you're doing this
| from a relatively poor country with not much formal education.
| 100% worth it.
|
| And who knows, maybe you manage to actually KEEP one of those
| jobs, which given how bad some employers are at figuring out
| who's good and bad at this stuff, is entirely plausible.
| AyyWS wrote:
| At a big telecom we had an employee that maybe closed 10
| tickets in two years. He was the highest paid team member (as
| reported by our director) and worked remotely from an RV in
| Oklahoma. When he was finally discovered by our director, he
| was fired and his immediate manager was fired.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| How much do you want to bet that he also had one or two
| other jobs that he treated the same way?
| AyyWS wrote:
| He was a long time employee with a legacy job title
| "wintel engineer." A transformational ex-IBM director was
| finally brave enough to PIP and fire him. I think he was
| mostly retired while putting in 8 hours of work a
| quarter.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It would take months for the company to figure out that the
| person is not doing anything, is not who they pretend to be,
| and fire them. Months during which that imposter would have
| been paid to do literally nothing.
| ollien wrote:
| I guess at some company scale that would happen... you'd
| probably need pay someone to do onboarding for you (so you're
| not immediately flagged as a no-call-no-show), then you could
| go AWOL after that?
| codedokode wrote:
| 1) they could have developers from 3-rd world countries who
| have necessary skills but get low pay rate
|
| 2) they could have developers from countries currently under
| sanctions
| rngname22 wrote:
| They could be fully technically capable but unable to secure
| those jobs because of visas, location/timezone, the company
| having a prejudice against outsourcing/remote work, etc.
| chadmckenna wrote:
| Its possible they need someone with a "Senior" resume so they
| are able to charge $200/hour for their work. Then they are free
| to outsource it to 2 or 3 junior devs in a much lower priced
| market and pocket the difference.
| notahacker wrote:
| I assume they avoid jobs involving standups.
|
| In roles where communication is fully asynchronous, a competent
| offshore dev whose written English is considerably closer to a
| native speaker than their spoken English might be able to hold
| onto the job for a while, especially if they're good at
| excuses.
|
| If they're applying for US onshore jobs with below- _local_
| -market pay, they might even be considered relatively
| productive members of the team.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| I had two past co-workers who were almost certainly having
| someone else do their work, I think (especially) at non-
| software companies folks just don't get caught.
|
| Frankly, the work environment was slow-paced and generally non-
| confrontational so both co-workers I suspect of this behavior
| just managed to tread water. When I joined the group there was
| a very tight-knit group of 3-4 developers who were _very_
| protective of each other. There was always a handy reason why
| some schedule was slipping and the other fact is that in
| hindsight, there just weren 't very high expectations for them
| to accomplish anything.
| ajiosjioasfiojf wrote:
| Darknet Diaries had an episode where they mentioned that hackers
| will do this (hire someone to land a job for them) routinely to
| get into companies.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Upwork is a cesspool. There's a lot of shady shit going on in
| there. Another scam they're doing there is for someone to borrow
| your Apple App Store or Google Play Account to upload their
| build.
| thisisjasononhn wrote:
| I know this is HN, but an entire thread about imposters and not
| one mention of Among Us... maybe that's just my viewpoint :)
|
| But that said, I do wonder if Innersloth actually has to deal
| with similar issues like this, especially after the boom of
| interest in the game. Maybe not?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| sketchy interview stuff is how ronin got hacked. I feel like
| impersonating other people in a job market or "fake interviews"
| will be more common. Really scary and a relatively common
| practice compared to the knowledge out there about it.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| A long while back I was sitting in a coffee shop, and happened to
| meet a guy recounting his work history to a client. The hilarious
| part was hearing my life plagiarized off my web CV at the time.
| Seeing the con describe climbing an antenna mast where I worked
| was awe inspiring given he was over 350lbs. I tipped off the
| client to do his own verification after, as there was no way that
| guy was part of our small team at that time.
|
| Some people are certifiably insane, and will con anyone to make
| money. Note, confronting psychopaths with proof they are liars is
| extremely dangerous. These are the people that will hold grudges
| for decades if they feel you owe them something, or do something
| nasty.
|
| Weak Stenography in your CV is also good for auto-
| screening/blacklisting those engaged in social-engineering
| workers. You would be surprised who shows up. ;)
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Agreed, what Stenography?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Another time perhaps, as I am currently focused on this
| crispy golden grilled-cheese sandwich =)
| g8oz wrote:
| Can you give more details about this stenographer tactic?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| I'd tell you, but I'm busy making a grilled-cheese sandwich
| =)
| ckw wrote:
| I received a message from a stranger on LinkedIn in fall of 2020:
| "Good talking to you the other day." I assumed they'd intended to
| message some other person with the same name, but no, it turned
| out that someone had applied for a developer position at their
| company as me. They gave me a link to the person's profile on
| another site, which was basically a copy of my LinkedIn profile,
| with some details tailored (presumably) to the role in question.
| We both contacted the site and soon after the fake profile
| disappeared. I hadn't thought about it since. A strange detail
| from my perspective, reading this thread: my first name is also
| Connor.
| 30minAdayHN wrote:
| The craziest thing I came across my recent travels to India is
| that people applying to jobs hire a shadow interviewee. They will
| sit in the same room controlling keyboard and mic. They will
| train you to do the fake lip movement. They will give interview
| while you face the camera. They charge you roughly 10% or so of
| what you would make if you land the job. I heard this from
| reliable sources where my friends came across such fake
| interviewers while interviewing and also friends who has seen
| some colleagues who hired these shadow interviewers to land a
| bigger / better paying job.
|
| This goes even deeper. During pandemic, supposedly there are even
| shadow engineers who does the work for you. :-(
| bdcravens wrote:
| A couple of weeks ago I received this email:
|
| "Hi, Billy
|
| How are you?
|
| I checked your Codementor account, it is great.
|
| I am *** **** from Ukraine.
|
| I am 32 and I am also a computer programmer.
|
| I want someone who can help me.
|
| Would you lend me your account?
|
| If you borrow it, I can earn a lot of money.
|
| I will pay 100 usd every month.
|
| Regards."
| vlunkr wrote:
| 100$ a month for some fraud. Not very enticing lol.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Yeah I've had people ask to buy my codementor account
| (https://codementor.io/jleclanche). I forwarded all of them to
| support@arc.dev, but I suspect some people always say yes ...
| mk89 wrote:
| People, I really tried to read comments to understand if someone
| had my same question: what for?
|
| Eventually you need to pay this person, he/she will need to give
| you some ID or passport, etc. How can someone just employ a name?
| Or is it just because they are contractors (so no document /
| background check)?
| axus wrote:
| Sounds like this scam artist did more work to land Connor a job
| than some recruiters.
| walrus01 wrote:
| There are people out there right now putting a truly astounding
| amount of information on their wholly-public Facebook, Instagram
| and LinkedIn profiles.
|
| My main message for people is to _resist the social temptation_
| to share every detail of your family 's life on social media, in
| the long run it's better for your privacy, your family's privacy,
| your security, and reduces opportunities for malicious data
| mining.
|
| It's sufficient to build an entire identity theft kit if you're a
| malicious actor wanting to impersonate somebody. Somebody would
| combine whatever is available from social media with things like
| linkedin profiles, CVs, github projects, other github-like-
| project profiles, and linkedin-type business networking site
| data.
|
| Or at least a good enough to pass cursory inspection/examination
| identity theft kit to impersonate somebody with a close-enough
| email address, or a throwaway custom domain name registered for
| the purpose.
|
| I would highly recommend anyone that _does_ keep an account
| somewhere like Facebook to stop posting photos of your house,
| family members and to set all of your 'privacy' settings to
| whatever is the friends-only/maximum setting. Try looking at your
| own profile from a different browser with no cookies in a burner
| account or incognito mode and see if any of your personal life is
| visible.
| permo-w wrote:
| good luck getting a burner account on facebook
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I think the root of the issue is LinkedIn. I know a number of
| scammers regularly monitor LinkedIn. When a new employee at our
| office updates LinkedIn they start getting email from the 'CEO',
| first asking for a personal cell number, and then asking to buy
| gift cards in a hurry.
|
| I'm seriously considering being LinkedOut.
| absolutelynobo wrote:
| This has happened to every new employee at my company within a
| month of them joining.
| freedomben wrote:
| Interesting. I doubt it was the same person, but I was approached
| with a proposition regarding Upwork not super dissimilar to this
| three times by somebody on the Elixir Slack. I think it was the
| same "person" each time just with different accounts because they
| kept getting banned by the admins.
|
| Basically the person would write to me and say something like,
| "I'm a good $language dev and am worth $120/hr but in my country
| that is really high pay and people won't pay it unless you're
| American. I'll get closer to $25/hr." Then the deal is something
| like this: "We will apply for jobs/contracts in your name, but
| I'll do 100% of the work and you keep half the money and send me
| the other half."
|
| The worst part is, I get the feeling that the premise is actually
| true and that this person is merely trying to beat the system.
| However, I could never bring myself to do such a thing due to the
| dishonesty required. Secondarily (but importantly) I've been
| burned by low-cost foreign contractors that billed for over a
| week before essentially delivering nothing, so I'm a bit once-
| bitten twice shy. I likely never would, but have considered doing
| a similar strategy but in an honest way where I'm up front with
| the client that I won't personally be doing all the work, but
| instead will out-source it, but I would be their point of
| contact/PM and if the work wasn't acceptable then (worst case
| scenario) I would (re)do it all personally.
| 27leaves wrote:
| Connor: I found it kind of a funny twist that when I wanted to
| leave a comment on the bottom of your blog, it assumes that my
| name is Connor Tumbleson. It's like you want people to pretend to
| be you ;)
| silexia wrote:
| The root problem we have on the Internet now is anyone can scam
| anyone without repercussions. We need real identities online, and
| perhaps an international body that can prosecute crimes.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| My actionable advice to remote hiring managers: vet your upwork
| guys really hard. Have them turn on webcam in every meeting you
| have.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Better title than before. Thank you!
| limelight wrote:
| It looks like this scammer has been targeting well-credentialed
| developers for over a month. Here's a Twitter thread from August:
| https://twitter.com/searls/status/1534913027795038208?s=46&t...
| atleta wrote:
| I've been approached several times online by different people who
| wanted to buy my CodeMentor (now arc.dev) profile. It's a pretty
| strong profile with a lot of good feedbacks, but I haven't done
| any work (mentoring) in the past few years.
|
| I see how this could be valuable as it can be really hard to
| build credibility from 0. (Though it definitely depends on the
| particular platform rules/dynamics.) E.g. I used to have an
| Elance profile for 15 years or so, which got transitioned to
| Upwork, but it mostly got reset to zero. When I last checked
| about 5 years ago I was presented as someone who has never worked
| there and never had any feedback which would have made it very
| hard to win projects. (Not that it seemed worthwhile anyway.) So
| while it's 100% unethical, there is probably a pretty strong
| motivation for these kind of trickeries.
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