"connortumbleson.com refused to connect" - HN HoD?
Someone is pretending to be me
11–20 of 395 posts
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#12Bizarre. I (US-based engineer with an Upwork account) was invited into a less sophisticated variant of the scam in spring 2021:
> Nice to meet you. I am looking for a US person who do business with me. You can earn money with a few cooperation. Do you know Upwork or Toptal site?
They also had the text of the message in a GitHub repo. I tried reporting them to GitHub, Upwork, and Toptal, but I don't think they knew what to do with it? I assumed my scammer was looking to evade banking rules or sanctions, but it could be for either fake employment or actual work with a US-based persona like in this case.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#13Wow. 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 compani…
This is one of the many reasons I don't dilvulge anything on LinkedIn and merely use it as a funnel to my contact page on my own site.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#14Sounds like this scam artist did more work to land Connor a job than some recruiters.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#15Why didn't they make a up totally fake person with a fake history instead of using a real person? I feel like it's possible to do, even fake a github.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#16I could sure use a flowchart to follow this story. Baffling level of fraud.
This is the type of arbitrage that happens when developers have similar technical skills but not similar interviewing skills.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#17I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that.
The author's sleuthing is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg from 1989. [1]
[0] Andrew blogs at https://unfooling.com/, according to the article.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#18Wow. 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 compani…
A company I was working for wanted to bring on a couple of freelance devs for a short-term project and I had to handle the interviews. I ended up uncovering a whole scheme where an experienced dev in the US would hop on the calls/video interview and then the actual work would be handed off to some other people based overseas. If you tried to contact the “dev” for something, your call would be routed to a google voice…
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.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#19> I then learned this was a interviewee discovered through Upwork
People trying to get cheap labor and instead get defrauded.
I feel bad for Connor though.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#20Like all scams and spam, if it didnt work then people wouldnt do it. But I am struggling to see how it will work.