361–370 of 395 posts
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…
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't help though if your name happens to be Kevin Smith or something.
Speaking of the "Kevin Smith" 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!
I wonder how widespread this really is? If it's reasonably common, there might be a place for a "reputation protection" 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's professional reputation is tarnished this way. If a prospective emplo…
My new startup is a protection racket! Sure would be a shame if your good reputation was tarnished by some low-skill offshore devs...
If you are a software developer, check to make sure you aren'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/Laravel devs had impersonators on Upwork as well around the same time. One of these other de…
How might someone 'check' for this on Upwork?
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…
Can you give more details about this stenographer tactic?
If you are a software developer, check to make sure you aren'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/Laravel devs had impersonators on Upwork as well around the same time. One of these other de…
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…
Agreed, what Stenography?
Earlier 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…
> who'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're also infiltrating the client'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 do…
This is my concern here. Sounds like a new worse version of identity theft.
The most powerful players are not part of the con but they benifit from it. The gov gets its taxes. The corporation gets a worker that does the job.
In cases like these where the victim is only indirectly robbed the powers that be are not very responsive. Double so when the enforcer (IRS) is also indirectly benefiting from the crime by having your taxable income jacked from 23% to 37% because there are several people with real jobs working under your name.
I already feel bad for the first people to have to deal with this legal situation. It will take years for the IRS to wake up and do something about it. Meanwhile their lives will be wrecked.
The worst part might be that no one will really care. Since this is targeting tech workers that are by many considered to be privileged and over compensated. People will just sarcastically say things like boo whoo did you get over taxed, you'll find a way to deal with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>These people are organized to perform identity theft, which is literally organized crime This 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.
You don't think this is a crime? I mean, IANAL but I'm pretty sure taking in income while posing as someone else must constitute a crime. If not, lesson learned I guess. (Don't know unless you talk to a lawyer or try to report it.) But if it is a crime, then yes, it's across state and national boundaries, so who else would have jurisdiction but federal police?
If you break into a car while your buddy keeps watch, have you created a criminal enterprise worthy of being compared to mafias and terrorist groups? If so, what is meaningful about the concept of organized crime as it is currently used and accepted?
Are you aware that there are non-federal police that have the purview of arresting little mom and pop criminal enterprises? Not everything is an automatic RICO case.