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.

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&#x2F;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.

What difference does this make if the information is on your own site? Or do you share upon request only?

This is one of the many reasons I don&#x27;t dilvulge anything on LinkedIn and merely use it as a funnel to my contact page on my own site.

Linkedin is an absolutely massive security hole. I&#x27;m surprised at the degree to which it hasn&#x27;t been exploited.

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.

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&#x27;s he&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32996457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32996457</a>

This is the type of arbitrage that happens when developers have similar technical skills but not similar interviewing skills.

In a lot of ways it&#x27;s a convoluted form of arbitrage.  These people &quot;buy&quot; developer labor in the cheap markets and &quot;sell&quot; in the expensive ones.  Obviously bad when the developer labor doesn&#x27;t get delivered as advertised.  But if you can pull it off then mostly good for everyone.

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&#x27;m not sure he&#x27;s going to beat getting half of potentially dozens of US-based developers&#x27; contract incomes for less effort than spamming job boards and running a Slack channel

No matter how much work you put into setting up a scam, you&#x27;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 &quot;Plamen&quot; 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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zaplatomer.bg&#x2F;en&#x2F;salaries-in-country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zaplatomer.bg&#x2F;en&#x2F;salaries-in-country</a> 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&#x27;t be nearly as profitable and comfortable as it would be living from a nice house in Bulgaria. All they&#x27;d need is a good internet connection and a shifted sleep schedule to take part in meetings.That&#x27;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.

Whenever I read these kinds of super-complicated scams, I can&#x27;t help but think if the scammer would have instead invested all that time and effort into legitimate tech and interviewing skills, he&#x2F;she could have just come in the front door! It&#x27;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 &amp; Peele Bank Heist[1]1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM</a>

I could sure use a flowchart to follow this story. Baffling level of fraud.

Related active discussion in this thread. Ask HN: Have you experienced “hiring fraud?”<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32996457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32996457</a>

&gt; A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push people back to the officeWhich 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&#x27;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 &quot;enough&quot;, would you really check? Probably most people nowadays wouldn&#x27;t care, as long as you deliver.The truth is: most people are honest, they do &quot;normal&quot; work, they get a raise, etc. Then there is a percent of people which exploits the system. A system that let&#x27;s be honest tries to profit from them too by giving lower wages, etc.

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 &#x27;the guys working 4 jobs and barely doing anything for us&#x27;, the &#x27;guy starting his own company that competes with us at the same time as working for us&#x27;, the &#x27;guy who farms out all his work to subs in India&#x27;, etc.It&#x27;s easy to say &#x27;if they don&#x27;t notice, then clearly it&#x27;s not a problem&#x27; - 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&#x2F;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 &#x27;everyone else is doing it&#x27;, and &#x27;I&#x27;d be foolish to not do the same thing everyone else is&#x27;.).The biggest issue I&#x27;ve seen with remote work (in practice), is it makes it really hard for a manager to see and actually understand what&#x27;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&#x27;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.

These kind of frauds are really bad for legitimate remote workers. Hope employers don&#x27;t get burned and start cutting back on remote opportunities.

Cached mirror, since I&#x27;m getting a gateway timeout: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220927155115&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;connortumbleson.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;19&#x2F;someone-is-pretending-to-be-me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220927155115&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;connortum...</a>

Allow me!  It was awful and Nathan should be done with television as he&#x27;s incapable of empathy.

From the headline alone, I was hoping this would be someone writing about being the subject of Nathan Fielder&#x27;s &quot;The Rehearsal&quot;.

&quot;connortumbleson.com refused to connect&quot; - HN HoD?

Same, although I was never asked to impersonate anybody. They just wanted to work using my real name&#x2F;identity, and would throw some money my way every month. At the time I was annoyed&#x2F;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&#x27;s fault. Their platform is a race to the bottom, yet they make it very difficult&#x2F;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.

Bizarre. I (US-based engineer with an Upwork account) was invited into a less sophisticated variant of the scam in spring 2021:&gt; 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&#x27;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.

Sounds like this scam artist did more work to land Connor a job than some recruiters.

It&#x27;t way more work to make a fake profile, with actual contributions to different (real) repositories, then just pretend to be an existing one.

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.

If they want to actually start and collect a few paychecks, then they&#x27;ll need to pass a background check from HireRight or whoever. This&#x27;ll probably include transcript checks, verifying past employment, etc.Much easier to just use a real person&#x27;s identity.

Why didn&#x27;t they make a up totally fake person with a fake history instead of using a real person? I feel like it&#x27;s possible to do, even fake a github.

&gt;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&#x27;s definitely a concern when you need to worry about spies infiltrating your company

I&#x27;ve simply asked candidates &#x27;tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement&#x27;. I&#x27;m kind of surprised that it&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m big on personal Integrity.It doesn&#x27;t seem to win me any points.In fact, it seems to actually count against me, as I&#x27;m sometimes accused of being &quot;snobby.&quot;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&#x27; 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 &quot;legally&quot; 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).

A couple suggestions:* take them on a tour of your chocolate factory* ask them to pull a magical sword out of a stone

&gt; 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&#x27;ve been wondering about ways to test students on &quot;trust&#x2F;morals&quot; and
decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood
qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowledge, salary, even
age&#x2F;gender&#x2F;race above dependability&#x2F;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&#x2F;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?

He he. For a second, that&#x27;s what I thought as well. But I want to believe the story is legit.

Perhaps at the end of the day that&#x27;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

Unless their moral karma somehow bypasses keyword filtering, leetcode, and discrimination, unlikely.

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&#x27;s sleuthing is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll&#x27;s The Cuckoo&#x27;s Egg from 1989. [1][0] Andrew blogs at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unfooling.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unfooling.com&#x2F;</a>, according to the article.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)</a>

&gt; I then learned this was a interviewee discovered through UpworkPeople trying to get cheap labor and instead get defrauded.I feel bad for Connor though.

&gt; I&#x27;ve heard enough instances of people paying others to take exams for themBack 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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s the documentation that catches you.

Sometimes just the possibility of it working, and the person&#x27;s desperation, will cause them to try it. I&#x27;ve heard enough instances of people paying others to take exams for them that it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;ll be able to keep the job once they have it.I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;m better against them having the skill level they think they do.

Like all scams and spam, if it didnt work then people wouldnt do it. But I am struggling to see how it will work.

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.

And they all have 500+ connections.  Bet they&#x27;re scraping profiles or some crap.

Scam is rampant on LinkedIn. I&#x27;m getting constant connection requests from obviously fake profiles with AI generated faces.

These scams have been happening for decades. It&#x27;s as hilarious as infuriating when somebody shows up to a job site and it&#x27;s clearly not the person that was interviewed.

Yeah I&#x27;ve had people ask to buy my codementor account (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codementor.io&#x2F;jleclanche" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codementor.io&#x2F;jleclanche</a>). I forwarded all of them to support@arc.dev, but I suspect some people always say yes ...

100$ a month for some fraud. Not very enticing lol.

A couple of weeks ago I received this email:&quot;Hi, BillyHow 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.&quot;

The Darknet Diaries guy will probably want to interview you after this.

That&#x27;s exactly how I know Connor too. Wild to see him at the top of HN with this story.

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.

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.

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.

Is any actual work happening here? Does someone ever sign an offer letter and start checking in source code?

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&#x27;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&#x2F;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.

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.

So my guess is that the scam ends with the scammer negotiating a &quot;deposit&quot; 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.

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&#x27;s identical twin to join the call and make them fight over who&#x27;s the real one. Bring time travel into it. Make outlandish demands of the interviewer to prove that they&#x27;re not a Zorblaxian spy.

Haha, when you put it like that, I can totally see why the interviewer was &quot;awesome&quot; and let the guy stay on. He was totally there for the drama.

Eh, don&#x27;t bet on it. What if #2 was real, and #1 was someone stalking #2? Or an abusive ex?If #2 doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s hilarious and awesomely entertaining, but don&#x27;t do it if you have assets someone could go after, as eventually, someone will.

Oh, I&#x27;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&#x27;s a risk I would take to be able to witness this sort of thing in real-time.

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.

&gt; Is it a good legal&#x2F;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&#x27;t have all of the background we did while reading this blog. They haven&#x27;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.

This was my immediate reaction too. Would make my whole week.

Some trainwreck interviews make for good office lore and this one tops the cake.

You know that interviewer was shitting themselves when og Conor unmuted and said wtf mate.

considering that this was a zoom call I would guess looking like the real Connor also helped ;)

I get the sense that &quot;real Connor&quot; 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 &quot;source code&quot; 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!

I feel like this PND thing might just be an agency for the folks on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;overemployed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;overemployed</a> to outsource the acquisition of their 2nd, 3rd, 4th jobs.

An interviewer whom asks all the same questions is better suited in HR or hiring accountants. That&#x27;s called a quiz, not an interview.When interviewing, you do an actual interview, which is where you research whom you&#x27;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.

It kind of reminds me of a time travel thriller. They have to act fast too as Connor#2 will be joining any second.

This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer&#x27;s position. You&#x27;ve been doing interviews every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation. You&#x27;re about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you&#x27;re 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you&#x27;re in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that&#x27;s ever happened.Is it a good legal&#x2F;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?

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 &#x2F; requiring tests &#x2F; 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 &quot;worker&quot; start.I guess this is a downside of all remote work assuming your company is less than thorough in checking references&#x2F;documents&#x2F;etc.

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&#x27;re attempting to eliminate that bottleneck by just having the subcontractor impersonate the employee.

Wanna buy my list of customers who let their subscriptions end?

My new startup is a protection racket! Sure would be a shame if your good reputation was tarnished by some low-skill offshore devs...

I wonder how widespread this really is?If it&#x27;s reasonably common, there might be a place for a &quot;reputation protection&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s tax situation.... I&#x27;m off to look for my name on Upwork, I guess.

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.

You&#x27;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.

This is utterly creepy. Kudos to the college kid who did the right thing here.I&#x27;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&#x27;t live in (I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

And how do we know the author is not pretending to be him?

I guess at some company scale that would happen... you&#x27;d probably need pay someone to do onboarding for you (so you&#x27;re not immediately flagged as a no-call-no-show), then you could go AWOL after that?

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.

Its possible they need someone with a &quot;Senior&quot; resume so they are able to charge $200&#x2F;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.

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.

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 &quot;it depends&quot; and pretending your connection is bad. You still made like $5,000. And you&#x27;re probably running more than one of these scams at a time. And you&#x27;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&#x27;s good and bad at this stuff, is entirely plausible.

They could be fully technically capable but unable to secure those jobs because of visas, location&#x2F;timezone, the company having a prejudice against outsourcing&#x2F;remote work, etc.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t very high expectations for them to accomplish anything.

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&#x27;re good at excuses.If they&#x27;re applying for US onshore jobs with below-local-market pay, they might even be considered relatively productive members of the team.

1) they could have developers from 3-rd world countries who have necessary skills but get low pay rate2) they could have developers from countries currently under sanctions

What I can&#x27;t piece together here is what the scammer&#x27;s endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They&#x27;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&#x27;s not adding up

This post made me look up my name on Upwork. Luckily I am not there. Currently contemplating wiping out my info from LinkedIn

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 &quot;soft circled&quot;. The text was distinctive enough that I immediately recognized it and it couldn&#x27;t have been any other person. I&#x27;d never met them before that call and wasn&#x27;t looking for a job.

Also just ratchets the value of &quot;old email accounts&quot; 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&#x27;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.

Speaking of the &quot;Kevin Smith&quot; 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!

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&#x27;t help though if your name happens to be Kevin Smith or something.

Careful or he&#x27;ll change his twitter handle to &quot;thought leader&quot; and write an self-help ebook about it.

&gt; ”The fake Connor Tumbleson immediately left the Zoom call.”I guess he felt the ultimate Impostor Syndrome.

If your fake profile is not on Upwork yet, then you apparently have a disappointing (or at least a not marketable) career.

This has happened to every new employee at my company within a month of them joining.

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 &#x27;CEO&#x27;, first asking for a personal cell number, and then asking to buy gift cards in a hurry.I&#x27;m seriously considering being LinkedOut.

I had to review a number of developer resumes from a similar site back in 2020. Reading through them absolutely set off my &quot;this is a fake person&quot; 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.

I interviewed one guy that seemed to fit this description -- he didn&#x27;t speak much, and when he did his accent was strong. He had someone with him, that seemed to speak on his behalf.

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&#x27;t considered it). So there&#x27;s a bigger market of better paying gigs out there for a &quot;candidate&quot; than an &quot;offshore agency&quot; (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&#x27;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&#x27;s actually six other people he&#x27;s never met doing most of the work and identity theft to take on remote full time roles involving work they probably can&#x27;t handle.

That&#x27;s actually one of my jobs, I&#x27;m a liaison-PM between a Canadian company and developers situated in Nepal, Egypt, etc.I&#x27;m in Uruguay so my timezone works out for all involved.

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&#x27;t. The English-speaking PM was on calls with us, and then he&#x27;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&#x27;s pretty clear that anyone looking for fake interview candidates is not actually planning to do that. They&#x27;re essentially counting on the fact that it takes many companies a little while to get rid of a bad hire.

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&#x27;t do that.

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&#x27;t even really disclose who&#x27;s doing the work, and sometimes in their invoices they&#x27;ll have a paralegal&#x27;s initials under the &quot;Atty&quot; column.This is sometimes true even for very large and reputable law firms.

Hello, it me! Or was anyway.Every solution architect&#x2F; pre sales engineer you talk to before the ink is signed isn&#x27;t there to do the work, they&#x27;re there to build trust and confidence that the other folks who can&#x27;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 &quot;Quality Assurance.&quot;

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&#x27;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&#x27;t get promoted during the project. On the other hand, if i&#x27;m an author on three or four wins for large projects over a year then i&#x27;m much more likely to get promoted regardless of how those turnout at the end of their schedules.

This is standard operating procedure with large Indian outsourcing-companies.Get the contract using great people. Before the ink on the contract is dry, send in hopelessly underqualified staff. By the time the client finds out, their &quot;old&quot; internal resources are long gone, bonuses have been paid out to management for reducing cost etc.I experienced this first-hand with Cognizant.

I&#x27;ve heard of large consulting companies that do a &quot;bait and switch&quot; where the client initially talks to a fantastic technical person prior to signing a contract, then never hears from them again.

Someone messaged me on reddit once, and straight up asked me to do exactly this. Below is the message, but I haven&#x27;t included their name because I think they were at least trying to seem sincere.---Hi, hope you&#x27;re doing well.We are looking for a professional interviewee. I&#x27;m not sure if you&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re interested in further discussion. Thank you!

&gt;So we can see the 35 members in this Slack, but I don&#x27;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.&gt;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 &quot;unaware&quot; of the behavior. &quot;Excuse me, did you know you&#x27;re in a group that is actively committing crimes?&quot; How do you think they&#x27;re going to respond?

We blew &quot;morals&quot; out the air lock long ago. Not to mention, morals are subjective.I don&#x27;t understand why corporations are not embracing and encouraging such arrangements.

From the perspective of the company, there&#x27;s immediate concerns around sensitive information, intellectual property, corporate&#x2F;government espionage -- none of which seem unlikely in positions premised on flexible morals.IMO if there were registered&#x2F;regulated, established services that filled this need and handled the VISA&#x2F;background check process then I wonder if companies might be willing to work with overseas developers more.

&gt; who&#x27;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&#x27;re also infiltrating the client&#x27;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.

Everybody wins until the tax man comes knocking for all of the dollars owed, or when &quot;Connor Tumbleson&quot; gets flagged as a terrible employee when all those copy-pasted qualifications don&#x27;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&#x27;t see why they wouldn&#x27;t. You&#x27;d be on the hook if they mess up, but the same is true when you lie to your friend&#x27;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&#x27;d call the authorities the moment I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re supposedly capable enough to do better. I&#x27;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.

It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t hide), so it&#x27;s hard to blame them for hiding doing it in those situations if they really can&#x27;t stop.But it almost never just goes perfectly forever does it? Eventually, either someone finds out (and now they&#x27;re exposed to blackmail risk, or a bitter divorce and lots of bad publicity), or someone gets sick with something they shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;d setup at the company. He was in charge of the affiliate program. I never cared for him, and wasn&#x27;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&#x27;t noticed the extra &#x27;tax&#x27; 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&#x27;s often lucrative enough however, that there is always the temptation.It&#x27;s why &#x27;sunshine is the best disinfectant&#x27; is still so true.After all, generally if everyone was actually comfortable with it and it&#x27;s side effects, there would be no need to be sketchy about it.

Say you do it... the company pays you $100&#x2F;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&#x27;re making and how much taxes you&#x27;ll owe on that $100&#x2F;h.Next there&#x27;s the fraudulent representation of who is doing the work to the client.Lastly, there&#x27;s the &quot;this is a form of money laundering&quot; and you&#x27;re taking a significant role.When this starts to unravel, you&#x27;re not going to come out ahead.

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.

Apart from the identity fraud and the issue of trusting a random person you don&#x27;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.

I think that the key point is, this kind of thing _is_ legit, if you are honest about what&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s identity to get contracts.

There&#x27;s a related scheme that I&#x27;ve seriously considered a time or two.I&#x27;m a pretty good software engineer, and they pay me very well, but I&#x27;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&#x2F;year. I think there&#x27;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&#x27;ve frequently entertained the notion of hiring someone to basically support me in my job without telling my employer, since there&#x27;s zero chance they&#x27;d get me such an assistant and similarly zero chance they&#x27;d let me pay for my own.I wouldn&#x27;t ultimately do it because, y&#x27;know, all the dishonesty involved, but it&#x27;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.

Is not this, more or less, what all consulting companies do? Take 30% and let someone else do the job?

It&#x27;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

If I can play devil&#x27;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&#x27;d get locally, and the US participant takes care of the &quot;soft&quot; side of the operation... who&#x27;s getting hurt?I can&#x27;t deny that something smells skeevy about this and I don&#x27;t think I could ever trust a random foreign developer who I haven&#x27;t built up a solid relationship with to execute reliably &quot;as me&quot; in the coding side of a role. But if I had a good friend from college who couldn&#x27;t get a VISA to the US? I dunno, I might be tempted to collaborate. If everybody wins, I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s inherently bad. But maybe I&#x27;m missing something.

I was approached on LinkedIn for a similar reason. It never went farther than LinkedIn because I was sketched out

I&#x27;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 &quot;business partner&quot; where I would take the meetings and he would do the work for a 30&#x2F;70 split. I told him, morals aside, that I didn&#x27;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.

Let&#x27;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&#x27;s say that, some of the time, this ploy is successful and the third party is hired for the position. Don&#x27;t they just get fired immediately? Is this entire scam just about getting a couple day&#x27;s salary? Or do some employers just shrug and go with the flow?

I just do a search for my full name and the impersonators will show up first in the results.

How might someone &#x27;check&#x27; for this on Upwork?

I actually have a weekly google alert that searches for my full name, which fortunately&#x2F;unfortunately is basically unique. It&#x27;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.

all things aside, it&#x27;d be a great ego-boost if someone thought me good enough to impersonate on Upwork

If you are a software developer, check to make sure you aren&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;m reading through the original post, and I see now that this was all done through Upwork as well. Yikes!]

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 &quot;rejects&quot; the candidate, and takes on the offer to cash out pay checks until they&#x27;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&#x27;s suspicion. It might not work with big companies but I&#x27;ve seen some companies using 3rd party services to send interviews invitation so it&#x27;s not completely unlikely that this could work.

I got an offer for something similar from someone recently, wanting to rent my codementor account that I haven&#x27;t used in half a decade. Strange times.

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&#x27;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.

I’d tell you, but I’m busy making a grilled-cheese sandwich =)

Can you give more details about this stenographer tactic?

Another time perhaps, as I am currently focused on this crispy golden grilled-cheese sandwich =)

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&#x2F;blacklisting those engaged in social-engineering workers. You would be surprised who shows up. ;)

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.

How does this work in the end? You&#x27;ll fail the background check when you send in your SSN.

&gt; 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.

Wait! Are you his manager or the imposter?!?!

I wasn&#x27;t in the room, but my manager was. Is that you, Preserved Killick?

What a small world! Unless you are also making up that story (which I would get a huge laugh out of) I&#x27;m 99% positive I was in the room with you when this happened. :)

In 1996, my employer got a contract to work with AT&amp;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 &quot;tell me about an interesting project you&#x27;ve worked on lately.&quot; 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 &quot;That&#x27;s interesting, because here at X, we just completed that project.&quot;Awkward silence. Then the interviewee got up and said &quot;I guess I should go now.&quot; My manager said &quot;Yes, I guess you should.&quot;Impersonation of this sort can be simultaneously disturbing and somehow comical. It isn&#x27;t a new phenomenon; I&#x27;m not decided on whether I believe the information age makes it easier or more difficult.

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&#x27;t good enough and I am only allowed to iterate over it once. He didn&#x27;t let me write my O(2n) solution down so he returned a strong no as feedback.

&gt; 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 questionIt 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.

This comment thread feels like a game of Mafia[1].1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mafia_(party_game)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mafia_(party_game)</a>

Recount _this_ story during the social &#x2F; break between interviews if you ever get an onsite. :D

Andrew, mad respect on your integrity and navigating an ethics situation one would expect to read about in a college study.

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&#x27;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.

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.

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!

There ya go, looks like a gained opportunity there!

why protonmail instead of gmail or dropbox mail?

Email me at my HN username at protonmail dot com for a referral to Dropbox&#x27;s internship. Love the integrity and drive to get to the bottom of a strange situation.

I wonder how many people in your position smell something rotten, but instead of trying to contact the &quot;real Connor&quot; just delete&#x2F;ignore all the messages because they don&#x27;t want to be part of even a bigger scam. (What if everyone is in on it, and they&#x27;re trying to scam you somehow?).

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!

Damnit with all these job offers dropping into Andrew&#x27;s inbox I definitely need someone to clone me so I can be all ethical and shit* Kidding I&#x27;m retired. Mad props, Andrew!

Andrew, see if anything here catches your eye... we&#x27;ve got a few openings. You can email me at my username at featurebase.com.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.featurebase.com&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.featurebase.com&#x2F;careers</a>

Haha yes. She&#x27;s honest and the best.

&gt; my girlfriend tells me, &quot;you&#x27;re good but let&#x27;s be honest here...&quot;My favorite part of this whole thing. Hang onto her.

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.

I&#x27;m grateful for all of the opportunities! Thank you everyone.

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 &quot;infrastructure&quot; it&#x27;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.

Ha! You&#x27;re good. I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve written (2000 lined React class with 15 states). It&#x27;s so bad that I put a warning in the repo and haven&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BlastWind&#x2F;xml-leaf-highlighter#design-decisions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BlastWind&#x2F;xml-leaf-highlighter#design-dec...</a>). I wanted to use regex since it was just a school project. Going to add an additional warning, thanks.

&gt; also: do not use regex for parsing XMLHE COMES! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1732348&#x2F;regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1732348&#x2F;regex-match-open...</a>

regex is overrated, real programmers parse XML with bash.#sarcasm #seenitinthewild

BTW, why are you applying just for internships? I checked out your (non-forked) github repos and you&#x27;re definitely better than I was as an intern. It&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BlastWind&#x2F;xml-leaf-highlighter&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;xml_leaf_highlighter&#x2F;main.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BlastWind&#x2F;xml-leaf-highlighter&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;...</a>). That is also a common newbie mistakeI hope this doesn&#x27;t come across as patronizing, I didn&#x27;t mean it so.

&lt;sarcasm&gt; Plot twist. The same organization is pretending to be Andrew to get some work opportunities &lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;. 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.

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&#x2F;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.

The biggest red flag is a senior engineer role paying $80hr!

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&#x27;m grateful, and I&#x27;ll carry on the spirit when I&#x27;m in the position to do so. The opportunities I&#x27;ve derived are nothing but amazing, but the most important thing I&#x27;ve learned is to internalize integrity as one of my greatest strengths: In the face of adversity and unfairness, I&#x27;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 &quot;impersonating&quot; 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: &quot;And I have seen boys like these, younger than these, their arms torn out, their legs ripped off. But there isn&#x27;t nothin&#x27; like the sight of an amputated spirit; there is no prosthetic for that.&quot;

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

&quot;So, Andrew, how did you decide to go into infosec?&quot;

&gt; They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variationYou should be able to solve them if they&#x27;re the same questions!

Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site.This story is also more fun from my position. I&#x27;ve been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They&#x27;re mostly rejections. They&#x27;re the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for &quot;impersonating&quot; 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&#x27;m about to repeat the experience for the 10th time and I&#x27;m 100% on autopilot. But suddenly, a man reaches out to me on email and offers me up to $80&#x2F;hr to be his senior engineer. This feels sketchy, my girlfriend tells me, &quot;you&#x27;re good but let&#x27;s be honest here...&quot;. Anyways, I proceed, it might just be the start of a beautiful thing. I&#x27;m asked to interview as one of our developers because English is not their best language. I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

sketchy interview stuff is how ronin got hacked. I feel like impersonating other people in a job market or &quot;fake interviews&quot; will be more common. Really scary and a relatively common practice compared to the knowledge out there about it.

Legit worried about these shenanigans now.  So much info is leaked via job searching.

good luck getting a burner account on facebook

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&#x27;s life on social media, in the long run it&#x27;s better for your privacy, your family&#x27;s privacy, your security, and reduces opportunities for malicious data mining.It&#x27;s sufficient to build an entire identity theft kit if you&#x27;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&#x2F;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 &#x27;privacy&#x27; settings to whatever is the friends-only&#x2F;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.

Slightly off topic, but&gt; Thankfully I&#x27;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.

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.

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&#x27;t help but feel there&#x27;s a whole community of people out there with few morals who are trading tips on how to set up scams like this. The &quot;web of lies&quot; seems so deep and complicated I can&#x27;t imagine this whole thing was built in a vacuum by one person.

Who&#x27;s going to report it? It would take forever and use op even more of your time. Better to get good at filtering.

&gt;We&#x27;ve had to get really good at recognizing patterns because their covers are really good (even faking passports and work history).I&#x27;m pretty sure that can get you into super duper extra trouble with the State Department.

I run a job platform. This scam is pervasive, especially with contract work. We&#x27;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&#x27;s a crop of new ones every few months.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s Egg thriller! I am dissapoint, but I guess &quot;who has time for all that?&quot; 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&#x27;t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don&#x27;t give way to hating,
And yet don&#x27;t look too good, nor talk too wiseIf 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&#x27;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 &#x27;em up with worn-out toolsIf 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: &#x27;Hold on!&#x27;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&#x27; worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that&#x27;s in it,
And - which is more - you&#x27;ll be a Man, my son!If: A Father&#x27;s Advice to His Son ― Rudyard Kipling

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&#x27;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.

I understand. But you don&#x27;t really know if you don&#x27;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&#x27;d be curious to know how common this is &#x2F; is becoming. It&#x27;s certainly novel to me.

At least the impersonators could land in hot water, if identified.

You vastly overestimate the degree to which the police give a shit. Unless there&#x27;s an actual financial loss or threat to life, they don&#x27;t care. This barely qualifies as identity theft anyway; it&#x27;s attempted fraud.They won&#x27;t take a report of your phone number being spoofed, but they&#x27;ll deploy SWAT teams to unsuspecting houses at the word of bored teenagers.Do you know the imposter&#x27;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&#x27;t show up with hard evidence (i.e. do all the work for them), you won&#x27;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.

I was going to comment about a police report, but largely because it might be useful for an insurance policy that covers identity theft.

You don&#x27;t think this is a crime?I mean, IANAL but I&#x27;m pretty sure taking in income while posing as someone else must constitute a crime.If not, lesson learned I guess. (Don&#x27;t know unless you talk to a lawyer or try to report it.) But if it is a crime, then yes, it&#x27;s across state and national boundaries, so who else would have jurisdiction but federal police?

&gt;These people are organized to perform identity theft, which is literally organized crimeThis 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.

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&#x27;s more trouble than it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s an interesting discussion for another thread, but in today&#x27;s remote work environment, new kinds of fraud are definitely an interesting consequence to be on the lookout for. Fascinating, and dangerous.

&quot;Incorrect&quot; here means the accent not matching the name. For example, it&#x27;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.)

&gt; 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&#x27;s not a valid tell. There are tons of developers in Western countries that have foreign accents.

I knew immediately it&#x27;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&#x27;t trust the reviews because accounts are routienly shared and&#x2F;or sold.I&#x27;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&#x27;s a drop in the bucket of the scams.

Someone is pretending to be me