Generally in my experiences as a candidate, _someone_ on the interview loop is with the team one would end up working with, and should catch this kind of thing. Generally as an interviewer, whether remote or onsite, it hasn't been part of the process to check the ID of the person I'm speaking to (and I'm not confident I could spot a fake anyway). Thinking back to a time where I did a day of interviews at a BigCorp and I don't know that any of my interviewers were on the specific team I'd work with ... I don't recall any rigorous attempt to establish my identity on the day.

Far easier to blend in as a remote employee.

Usually when this happens, the fake employee will come up with excuses to leave video off: They'll say their camera isn't working today or that their internet connection isn't good enough to turn the camera on right now. If they do turn it on, it will be massively backlit so you can't see their face.

Many companies don't even expect people to have video at all. The identity-swapping fraudsters are hoping that their companies fall into this category.

I'm not entirely sure there is a good fix for this, the problem would have always existed with in-person work as well - however the perceived risk/reward ratio would be different.

It’s plausibly a crime too (actual fraud), if pushed hard enough, though most courts will just laugh at companies and tell them they clearly didn’t do enough due diligence, so most people trying it will be worried about being arrested in person.

If doing fully remote, they could be dialing in from another country and immune from arrest. Makes it much easier to do.

There's a contradiction here, right?

If someone has never committed a crime before (which most likely, these patsies would be in that camp - it's too high risk and expensive for someone experienced to want to do themselves if they could send someone else), fear of prosecution is going to be high. After all, THEY know they're doing something wrong, even if no one else does.

Someone doing this is also very unlikely to have the direct experience managing a company, or dealing with these issues, to actually know the real risks of prosecution and likelihood of damaging consequences.

So since it's new, uncertain, potential consequences seem personally very damaging, and it's 'bad' == high fear.

They get a lot more dangerous once they've done it a few times, and the fear of the unknown wears off, and confidence starts to replace it. But since they're showing up in person, and would need (in this example) to physically be there for awhile, that's expensive, time consuming, and high risk.

Also, I fail to see how this can be prosecuted when there's no identity theft or forgery i.e. real crimes involved in this act. It can be all boiled down to being just another case of an under-qualified candidate holding a role without proper or adequate credentials due to flawed hiring procedures, or more frankly the incompetence of the decision makers inside the organization.

In this case, they were impersonating someone else. For them to get to the point of getting paid, they'd likely have to provide identity documents (including a SSN, some form of photo ID, etc.) if the company was doing their paperwork correctly. Even contractors have to cough up a SSN, and that is enough to trigger federal identity fraud charges.

If they provided real credentials and their real name, but had someone else sit in who pretended to be them to do the interviews, it gets trickier - it would still likely to be some variant of conspiracy to commit. Conspiracy at the federal level generally only requires a concrete action by a conspirator in furtherance of a crime, which with only a little squinting would likely apply here to anyone involved (including the fake interviewee).

I present to you 18 USC 1028, the federal identity fraud code. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1028], which provides penalties up to 5 years for a first and non-violent/non-drug related offense, or 20 years (for a second offense or other nastier qualifications). A felony, either way. It includes transferring said documents electronically.

My 'favorite' section is 7, which explicitly states that SSN, DOB, etc. count, as well.

Conspiracy would likely be under 18 USC 1346 & 1349 [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1346] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1349], which makes it a crime to 'deprive another of the intangible right of honest services', or conspire with another to do so.

Either way, as I said elsewhere, I doubt anyone would be particularly interested in such prosecution unless it was very high profile for some reason. It's hard to get anyone sympathetic about a large company getting scammed by someone this way. Most companies also don't like having a reputation or PR as being scammable.

So companies should be very interested in covering their asses here. That said, it IS also a federal (and likely state) level felony, so folks SHOULD also rightly be scared to attempt it.

If the right parties were motivated, it could easily result in many years in federal prison. And it's hard to say when someone will want to make an example out of something like this.

I forgot the link to USC 1341 (Frauds and Swindles), which is just a great read on it's own.

Regarding their request for an example -

Here is an example of a successful prosecution of someone for fraud (and tax evasion) for material lies about qualifications and job histories.

[https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2020/02/former-health-c...]

20 years for mail fraud, 5 years for tax evasion.

She was clearly going above and beyond on this front.

I doubt that it really happened since as you may have hinted, no prosecutors are interested in pursuing these cases for lack of sympathy as you put it, which I can't verify, or failure of winning the case which I suspect to be the chief motive here since misrepresenting facts or exaggerating events on your resume is not a crime.

And you're wrong - lying about MATERIAL facts, events, or qualifications to get a job is a crime.

Lying that you had a dog when you were a kid (when it's not relevant), for instance? No problem. That's not likely to be a material fact.

If you're interviewing to be a host of a kids show about dogs?

A problem.

Just not one most people are willing to make a case over. There also is the court precedent about 'mere fluffery' or 'puffery' not adding up to a lie, which would need to get worked out somehow. See [https://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171]

There is a line, for instance, between exaggeration and lying, that not everyone would agree where it sits.

This also substantially increases the reward. Traveling to SF for a 2 month con as a mid-level software engineer isn't a good deal. Working remote from a low cost location for a 2 month con might be a fantastic deal.

Bonus - chances are, little to no taxes compared to the other option too, depending on how they structured the scam. The cut-out/middle man would get left holding the bag, but what else is new.

Other Bonus - they wouldn't be using their real name, so chances are, no longer term impacts to the patsy either, unless they happen to end up trying to work legitimately with someone involved at the target company years later. Pretty unlikely to bother folks involved in this type of scam, IMO.

a person who wants to work remotely but doesn't figure out how to have a good internet connection, then they are not a good fit for remote work. If a person decides to travel to a location where internet connection is not good on the day of the interview, you can imagine what he/she will do when it's a regular work day.

Somebody shows up for a remote job and doesn't have a good internet connection is too big of a hiring risk to even both continuing the interview.

Trying to characterize having the camera off as being a nefarious tactic because you can't see them working is beyond asinine. There are many good reasons to have the camera off while working.

One being you are there to do work, you are being paid to do the work. One thing video has never gotten right inherently is the whole eye contact part of a video chat.

When you don't look directly at someone (the angle is wrong) while you are communicating its a non-verbal sign of disrespect or in-congruence, and it causes non-verbal communication issues regardless of intent.

The camera has never adjusted your eye angle, so you will always have that issue of people distrusting those communicating over video to a lesser or greater degree. With a flat picture and a phone call, you don't have that. You focus on the work and get things done.

If the candidate misrepresented their expertise, fire them.

If they aren't doing the work, fire them.

If they plain just aren't working out for other reasons, fire them! (after due dilligence).

I don't see why you have to bemoan your lack of due dilligence and instead blame it on something ludicrous like anyone with the camera off is doing this (when they aren't).

Lets call this plug what it is, you want to surveil your employees like a micro manager instead of actually doing due diligence (i.e. the job of hiring).

Seriously how hard is it to just fire someone that's a new-hire?

Its a new position, if it doesn't work out, hire someone else, and terminate the temporary contract with the appropriate legal clause and time periods.

Most work is an 'at will' position, so as an employer, if they lied, use that and 'fire at will'.

Excessively surveilling your employees while they do work only does one thing, and that's drop productivity through the floor. Not only that, it shows serious deficits in Upper Management, and any skilled/experienced candidates will walk away from positions with redflags like that.

You either want work to get done, or you just want to pretend that while doing something else.

What's your actual priority, making money and doing the job (due dilligence is part of that), or watching your employees work in minutia and spinning a narrative. You can't have both.

Secondarily there’s the “can they actually do the job” problem that has always existed. The new issue here is that we will now waste time on too many new hires who can’t make the grade, because we’re assuming that our hiring process was really good at weeding out the poor fits, and these “games” exploit the weaknesses. Rather than get into an arms race with fraudsters, perhaps hire two or three people for every opening on a short term and then only keep the ones who deliver.

I think this is a new risk when it comes to hiring engineers. This kind of fraud has been present outside of Engineering orgs for a long time.

I used to be a hiring manager in a well known company that was 100% onsite. This was on the business side, not IT/Engineering. We were looking for a BI person as a contract hire. Our HR org said they had a staffing agency they had worked with for years. The staffing agency sent us a bunch of resumes that were surprisingly similar, filled with every buzzword and feature (e.g. I made a bar chart) and obviously weren't written by the candidates. After throwing those out, there were a few that looked decent. We had some phone screens and then a single onsite interview, but concluded there was something fishy going on.

I confronted rep from the staffing agency with with this and their response was that typically somebody in a managerial position (at our company) picked a few resumes, had a phone call (not video, just phone) with them, then hired somebody based on the phone call. My team was the first one that had actually done more than that.

Who showed up on the first day, who actually did the work, I don't think anybody had any clue.

The non-technical managers didn't have the skillset to properly evaluate these candidates. So they saw the keywords and picked the person that sounded the best.

Engineers hopefully have the skillset to evaluate and interview other Engineers, so the fraud is different and more sophisticated now.

IMHO, if you're the type of manager who hires somebody like this and what you wanted done gets done, you've probably got bigger problems than a staffing agency scamming you. If you think it's rocket science to build a couple of charts in a BI tool and you're happy when the person you hired takes 6 months to build a couple of dashboards at $100/hr...good luck to you.

As an interviewee I'd take this as a very good sign that the company is serious about offering me a long term position. If I'm living on the west coast and my employer is on the east coast and my contract says 100% remote I'd seriously doubt the company is trying to fool me by wanting to meet me for one day, on their own dime, without further interviews.

There's a difference between trusting remote employees and aspiring employees.

I wouldn't hold it against the company if they want to do proper due diligence on a prospective employee especially given real-world accounts of such frauds occurring.

Why should an aspiring employee trust that a company is going to allow 100% remote if the first thing the company expects you to do is to travel into the office?

1. completely or entirely

It absolutely does mean zero travel.

Are they? I've been recently contacted for remote positions that turned out to be not remote twice.

So what? Those are irrational beliefs. Why should we care that someone never trusts remote workers?

You can never be 100% secure against fraud just like you can never be 100% secure against hacking.

We should certainly try to reduce the incidence of fraud, but only if you don't sacrifice the ability to hire who and when you need to.

Which WILL result in folks not being able to get hired that otherwise would be. It also will result in positions not being filled that are important at companies we likely depend on, resulting in lower quality of service and/or failures of those services.

It’s poisoning the remote employment well, essentially.

I've done it many times, pre-COVID. I live in a small town (<25k) in the South and have been working remotely for ~10 years. In that time I've gone through four rounds of interviews. The first three were pre-COVID, and they all included at least a "half day" of on-site interviews, most of which were in LA or SF. The most recent round was about eighteen months ago and didn't include any travel.

> Maybe the reason the candidate is looking for a remote job, is they don't have to travel?

This is not my experience. In my personal network of remote workers we're pretty uniformly working remotely because we don't want to move to where the companies are, not because we are entirely opposed to traveling. Each person has their own expectations of course, but I see traveling for less than a week per quarter as entirely acceptable.

But we're not pre-covid. Before covid I worked remote because it allowed me access to a larger job market without having to relocate, but I didn't mind occasional travel. Now that we're dealing with covid, there's no way you'd get me on a plane or in an office for a job interview. My health is worth far more than any particular job.

Still, that wouldn't solve for the "My laptop doesn't have a camera" problem for the early phases of the interview. You would need to save face / voice samples to cross-reference at various stages of the pipeline to watch for the changeling.

They work fine with people, can parse small talk and bring a positive attitude, etc. But they were out like a shot when the workday was over, and they would never dream of attending a company-sponsored teambuilding event. If they were hired for a 100% remote job, they would expect to never see a coworker in person, and consider it a perk.

Some people just don't want to mix their personal and professional lives. What's wrong with that?

I wouldn’t assume remote meant absolutely zero travel unless that was spelled out.

Remote means you don't need me physically present at a particular place (outside of knowing my location for tax purposes). It's pretty clear in the word "remote". If that's not always 100% the case, I would expect those expectations to me made clear during the hiring process, not after I've already come aboard.

Do you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to balk if you hired them for a remote role but then asked them to fly somewhere quarterly after they were onboarded?

Obviously people should take positions that align with their preferences however. Just be sure to specify upfront and be prepared to move if circumstances change.

I never attended any meet ups. I felt guilty about it but like you're saying here, I signed up to work remotely, not in an office ever.

Someone who won't help you avoid fraud might as well be pushing you into it.

But I like exploring new places. I’m not sure how popular all expenses paid weekend vacations are.

The only thing business travelers have in common is that they all think everyone views business travel just like they do.

Even with disabilities, inability to meet the job description is a legally valid reason to discriminate.