Earlier quoted context omitted.
My company had an issue like this recently, they just had a smart guy take the interview / handle the paperwork and then a completely different guy show up on their first day. My company is pretty small, so we caught it within an hour of getting him onboarded. But I can see this being trickier in bigger companies, where the hiring process is more disconnected from the team they get assigned to.
Maybe obvious question. Were in-person or video interviews done? Seems so likely to get caught. So fascinating as well having a person that was paid to do the interview. I guess there is a secret web site where people are waiting to do this as a service?
It seems unlikely that someone living in the US would take the test for someone else, since the risk is just too high. I'm pretty sure this is just straight up fraud you can get in trouble for. My bet is that this was a scam setup outside of the country, and they used a stolen identity to get the paperwork cleared.