I received a message from a stranger on LinkedIn in fall of 2020: “Good talking to you the other day.” I assumed they’d intended to message some other person with the same name, but no, it turned out that someone had applied for a developer position at their company as me. They gave me a link to the person’s profile on another site, which was basically a copy of my LinkedIn profile, with some details tailored (presumably) to the role in question. We both contacted the site and soon after the fake profile disappeared. I hadn’t thought about it since. A strange detail from my perspective, reading this thread: my first name is also Connor.
Someone is pretending to be me
321–330 of 395 posts
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#322Connor: I found it kind of a funny twist that when I wanted to leave a comment on the bottom of your blog, it assumes that my name is Connor Tumbleson. It's like you want people to pretend to be you ;)
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTW, why are you applying just for internships? I checked out your (non-forked) github repos and you're definitely better than I was as an intern. It'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…
> also: do not use regex for parsing XML HE COMES! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
I will never not upvote this link.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#324This seems similar to reports of North Koreans running deep fake interviews
Yikes... Scary stuff; better and easier to generate Deep Fakes will perhaps make this an even bigger problem in the coming years. We going to need builtin detection features in Teams/Zoom/etc.
Maybe deepfake-detection will be the next-gen's Anti-Virus business? :)
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#325Just imagine that all this could have been avoided if we would start using email signing ;)
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest red flag is a senior engineer role paying $80hr!
Too low? Too high?
Low. Much too low. Going rate starts in the low 100s and has no super hard cap.
80/hr overseas, or in less urban parts of the US is pretty standard. I’d question the reason for staying, though, since finding higher paying remote work is pretty easy these days…
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTW, why are you applying just for internships? I checked out your (non-forked) github repos and you're definitely better than I was as an intern. It'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…
> also: do not use regex for parsing XML HE COMES! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
That is truly a piece of modern techno art, appreciated by a choice few (that'd be us). Thanks for reminding me. Also, pro tip to people who haven't seen it: the "best" answer is not at the top, so remember to scroll down. :)
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#328This 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's more trouble than it's worth to deal with them. But this is a situation…
You vastly overestimate the degree to which the police give a shit. Unless there's an actual financial loss or threat to life, they don't care. This barely qualifies as identity theft anyway; it's attempted fraud. They won't take a report of your phone number being spoofed, but they'll deploy SWAT teams to unsuspecting houses at the word of bored teenagers. Do you know the imposter's actual identity? What would you e…
I understand. But you don't really know if you don'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'd be curious to know how common this is / is becoming. It's certainly novel to me.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#329This story is much more fun when you come at it from the interviewer's position. You've been doing interviews every week. They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation. You're about to repeat the experience for the 18th time and you're 100% on autopilot. But suddenly you're in a spy thriller. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened. Is it a good legal/corporate decis…
It kind of reminds me of a time travel thriller. They have to act fast too as Connor#2 will be joining any second.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's a related scheme that I've seriously considered a time or two. I'm a pretty good software engineer, and they pay me very well, but I'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/year. I think there's a decent chance that…
Delegation is the cornerstone of civilization.
https://sandstorm.io/news/2015-05-05-delegation-is-the-corne...>