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Someone is pretending to be me

connortumbleson.com

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Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#131

Post by jeroenhd »

ryandrake wrote: post #43
macintux wrote: post #3

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

Whenever I read these kinds of super-complicated scams, I can't help but think if the scammer would have instead invested all that time and effort into legitimate tech and interviewing skills, he/she could have just come in the front door! It's like the person who spends hundreds of hours putting together the perfect exam cheating scheme, where they could have instead put in half of that time actually studying! Or, i…

No matter how much work you put into setting up a scam, you'll never be able to beat the H1B lottery.

Companies know that they can pay less money to people in poor countries because an American wage in a third world country would have them live like kings. Going the honest route significantly cuts your profits if you live in these countries.

The "Plamen" person linked in this blog says he was educated in Sofia and Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. The average salary in Bulgaria ranges from $18k to $30k depending on the city (taking the optimistic route, here, sites like https://www.zaplatomer.bg/en/salaries-in-country give much lower numbers!); with an expected wage starting at $59k, they would be able to live a wealthy life earning twice the average wage just by getting lowballed by an American company. Spending that wage from a small California apartment wouldn't be nearly as profitable and comfortable as it would be living from a nice house in Bulgaria. All they'd need is a good internet connection and a shifted sleep schedule to take part in meetings.

That's assuming the guy can actually deliver on his tasks. My guess would be that these scammers have limited technical skills and rely on waiting for the slow evaluation process to fire them and then moving on to the next company.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#132

Post by lazide »

dont__panic wrote: post #107
mrandypratt37 wrote: post #86

I'm a US-based accountant who is currently interviewing for his first job in software and I was approached by someone on on LinkedIn about an opportunity. Seemed fishy, but figured I could risk 15 minutes. The person set up a meeting between me and a Taiwanese Developer for this exact thing. He said he had 7 years experience and had a contract drafted for he and I to become "business partner" where I would take the m…

If I can play devil's advocate for a moment... if the company gets decent work, the non-US participant gets better (and fairer, globally) pay compared to what they'd get locally, and the US participant takes care of the "soft" side of the operation... who's getting hurt? I can't deny that something smells skeevy about this and I don't think I could ever trust a random foreign developer who I haven't built up a solid…

It's generally all the OTHER details that people conveniently skim over in these descriptions that get people hurt, or the less obvious exposure to unexpected risks for the counterparty.

As a (pretty common) comparison - if a gay man marries a woman, has kids, does the whole couple thing and blends in, but periodically goes to clubs or gay bars, or has a boyfriend on the side, who are they really hurting?

What about the equivalent straight man with a mistress on the side? Or two? Or the woman with a side man?

Well, as long as everything goes perfect, I guess just themselves by pretending to be someone they aren't most of their lives and having to lie to everyone every day. And certainly the cards have been stacked against them in a great number of societies and environments (to the point of death penalties in some cases if they don't hide), so it's hard to blame them for hiding doing it in those situations if they really can't stop.

But it almost never just goes perfectly forever does it? Eventually, either someone finds out (and now they're exposed to blackmail risk, or a bitter divorce and lots of bad publicity), or someone gets sick with something they shouldn't have been able to, or pregnant, or whatever. There were a decent number of counterparties in supposedly monogamous relationships over the years that have gotten diseases they should not have been able to get, including HIV, from this type of stuff. It can trigger severe emotional trauma in people. Folks get killed over this kind of thing somewhat frequently.

From a corporate equivalent, think - traceable customer information leak. Or attackers get control of the corporate network through a hidden VPN endpoint configured to allow these contractors in to do things, and do things from crypto-ransom the company to outright rob the company blind.

An acquaintance at a company I only briefly worked at years ago got busted for siphoning MILLIONS of dollars through phony affiliates he'd setup at the company. He was in charge of the affiliate program. I never cared for him, and wasn't particularly surprised, and was part of the reason I left once I saw what I had gotten myself into, but it was a good cautionary tale.

The company had been really happy with overall performance, they just hadn't noticed the extra 'tax' they were paying him until he did something else sketchy and they started looking closer.

The reason to avoid doing sketchy things, is because they inevitably have hidden costs, from cognitive overhead from constantly tracking all the lies, to real risks of extreme bad problems that others are being exposed to. It's often lucrative enough however, that there is always the temptation.

It's why 'sunshine is the best disinfectant' is still so true.

After all, generally if everyone was actually comfortable with it and it's side effects, there would be no need to be sketchy about it.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#133

Post by boomskats »

blastwind wrote: post #125

Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site. This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two po…

No post body was provided.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#134

Post by dmoy »

blastwind wrote: post #125

Andrew here. Connor, thanks for releasing this on the orange site. This story is also more fun from my position. I've been applying to internships and interviewing every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation (sorry to top comment for "impersonating" your comment style). My days are deteriorating from a colorful sphere down to two points. In fact, down to two po…

> In fact, down to two pointers, left and right, iterating over a list of heights to find how much rain water it can trap.

Ah haha I hate that question

It should be banned everywhere, oh well.

I once saw a physicist (not even a coder) give a really cool answer to it though, I wish I could remember it.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#135

Post by laumars »

dleslie wrote: post #96
suoduandao2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not a more common question, but of course that makes it work - truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came up regularly.

I like "Tell me about a time you failed miserably, absolutely and unequivocally, and how you recovered from it." It's surprising how illuminating the responses are.

I remember in one job the company had a set of questions we had to ask candidates on top of the technical questions. One of them was “what would you describe as your biggest weakness?”

I always grown when I have to ask that question because you always get some stupid answers where people say things like “I’m just too organised” or similar spin to make a negative sound like a positive. Frankly I can’t blame them because it’s a ridiculous question to ask.

However this one candidate not only listed off one flaw but three of them. I remember thinking “shut up, shut up, shut up. You’re not supposed to answer this honestly!”

However this ironically turned out to be the reason I hired him. I figured if he is that honest and able to identify his flaws then he must have a good work ethic.

He turned out to be one of my best ever junior hires.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#136

Post by AyyWS »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #75
ollien wrote: post #57

What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview on their own. Something's not adding…

Maintaining is not the goal. Say you get a job that pays senior engineer money, and they fire you after maybe three weeks of you just saying "it depends" and pretending your connection is bad. You still made like $5,000. And you're probably running more than one of these scams at a time. And you're doing this from a relatively poor country with not much formal education. 100% worth it. And who knows, maybe you manage…

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.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#137

Post by lazide »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #128
lazide wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to find local cut-outs in most areas. In most cases, those folks are also patsies. Another, different party who cashes checks written to their name in exchange for a cut, for example. As an example, there is still the old in the tooth craigslist 'oops, I sent too large a cashiers check, can you send me the extra?' scam, which is an even more obvious ripoff, and people fall for that all the time. If appr…

I wasn't even thinking about the fact that it leaves a paper trail. I was just thinking about the fact that the company who ostensibly hired "John Doe" is being given payment details for "Jack Frost".

It wouldn't be hard to have it be John Doe all the way through, at least for folks doing this. Setting up things like this is a common tactic in a lot of common financial crimes now a days.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#138

Post by tg9000 »

jjslocum3 wrote: post #119

In 1996, my employer got a contract to work with AT&T to build a website that provided regular event updates from the Atlanta Olympics. In 1996, this was a very big deal, such a newish concept that the project was written up in AdAge or some similar industry magazine. A few months later a prospective junior engineer came in for an interview. My manager asked him the typical "tell me about an interesting project you'v…

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

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#139

Post by notahacker »

ollien wrote: post #57

What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview on their own. Something's not adding…

I assume they avoid jobs involving standups.

In roles where communication is fully asynchronous, a competent offshore dev whose written English is considerably closer to a native speaker than their spoken English might be able to hold onto the job for a while, especially if they're good at excuses.

If they're applying for US onshore jobs with below-local-market pay, they might even be considered relatively productive members of the team.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#140

Post by comboy »

travisjungroth wrote: post #106
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it a good legal/corporate decision to hide the person who claims to be the original and let him listen to the interview with the other candidate? Consider the situation from the perspective of the interviewer: They don't have all of the background we did while reading this blog. They haven't even had time to process what Connor #1 said by the time that Connor #2 arrives. The decision to hear them both out for a…

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 th…

Imagine inventing all of this just to listen to your interview.

Incentive to do that would have to be pretty wild.

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