Meh. The port-forwarding bit is probably unnecessary. And yes, there's a good chance you'll end up hacked and still poor, but there's still a decent chance that you'll end up with a large salary and not hacked. I suspect the black market is adequately efficient at self-policing when there's money involved.

Though that's where my scam would be most likely to fall apart. Recruiters typically only get their cut if the candidate doesn't get fired in the first N months. So if they purely cheated their way in, then the hiring company is only out a couple months of useless work. (Which could be very costly, to be sure, but at least they don't have to fork over the $50K. And there are many other reasons why a new employee doesn't pan out.)

> I suspect the black market is adequately efficient at self-policing when there's money involved.

I suspect that too, and this is something I'd really want to read more about - how does self-policing work in black markets and how effective is it. If anyone has any good sources, I'd be grateful for sharing.

RE fraud prevention, there were two interesting lines in the Starfighter's announcement:

> We assess for skill first, passively as players play our games and then actively. Our founders — talented technologists — personally reconstruct candidates’ solutions and evaluate them.

> We follow-up with players to ask if they have any interest in a no-obligation chat about career options. If they’re interested, we have an honest geek-to-geek conversation.

I suspect that between the first and the second there will be a place for Starfighter team to verify that the candidate has the skills his account shows. After all, if they want to maintain the access "deep into the hiring funnel", they have a strong incentive not to send bad candidates and waste their clients' time.