TIP: this is why you set up Google Alerts on your name and any nicknames/usernames you use often.
Someone is pretending to be me
381–390 of 395 posts
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#382TIP: this is why you set up Google Alerts[1] on your name and any common nicknames/usernames you use.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#383This 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…
I get the sense that "real Connor" must have been extremely good at concisely explaining the situation and giving the interviewer exactly the information he needed to believe real Connor and understand the situation. It made me think of one of those movies like groundhog day or "source code" where someone has multiple tries and eventually comes up with the most efficient possible thing to say to get someone to trust…
considering that this was a zoom call I would guess looking like the real Connor also helped ;)
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I was talking about organized crime. 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 ever…
> If you break into a car while your buddy keeps watch
But we are talking about a case where someone has created a company that they are using to perform this fraud. If you found a company where you hire individuals to watch each other while they break into cars, yes, I think that would be considered organized crime.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#385Andrew 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…
> They're mostly rejections. They're the same questions over and over with minor variation
You should be able to solve them if they're the same questions!
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't in the room, but my manager was. Is that you, Preserved Killick?
This is TG. I was the one who had to go on-site with this app in Atlanta for five weeks. I messaged you on Linked In. :)
Are you the guy who installed unlicensed Novell Netware servers at the Atlanta Olympics? I clearly remember those weeks, all of the Netware servers at IBM were beeping during the Olympics because someone had installed those unlicensed servers in Atlanta.
Probably not you though.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#387This 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…
At least the impersonators could land in hot water, if identified.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#388Someone messaged me on reddit once, and straight up asked me to do exactly this. Below is the message, but I haven't included their name because I think they were at least trying to seem sincere. --- Hi, hope you're doing well. We are looking for a professional interviewee. I'm not sure if you've heard similar thing somewhere. We are a talented developer group specialized in web and mobile software development. We ha…
If it were really true that this development group could deliver according to client expectations, they would do what many other groups do: form a consultancy and hire an English-language speaker not as a fake interview candidate but as a liason. I worked with a firm that did this. Basically, they had one project manager who could speak decent English and about six developers who couldn't. The English-speaking PM was…
That's actually one of my jobs, I'm a liaison-PM between a Canadian company and developers situated in Nepal, Egypt, etc.
I'm in Uruguay so my timezone works out for all involved.
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A big reason why a lot of companies are trying to push people back to the office Which is kind of useless for most of the points you described at the end. There are plenty of comments here really proving that you can scam even in person interviews. Let's say you are not scam, you pass an interview. You can still do all of those things while you work. The only way to prevent this is by having keyloggers and similar…
It’s harder/nearly impossible to scam at scale in person. It’s also way more obvious and personal when it happens, and it’s a lot easier to actually physically arrest someone if it gets really weird or out of hand, not that it was common for that to happen. I think we’re seeing the birth of a new industry, the equivalent of Nigerian email scams, but with job interviews. Exciting!
I heard a story about this happening at an Indian subsidiary of an American company, the person interviewed by the US manager was not the person that actually took the role ! It was discovered a few months in as the quality was not as expected (the person was actually a developer but not nearly as good as the one that was interviewed, he hired the interviewed person to pass the interview).
Re: Someone is pretending to be me
#390While it's not at all surprising, it was a fun read. Having used Elance/Upwork in the past, I was pretty sure quite a lot of off-shore (Indian, Eastern European) companies do a similar scheme. At least some of them definitely pretend to be a single developer and/or let one developer with better skills (communication and programming-wise) do the interview and then throw cheaper "resources" at the actual project. The s…
I saw "translation project", their sample documents, power plants chart, are written as confidentials internal use only. client location is palesthine territories. (There are no branch on this power plant company. )
I am not sure palesthine has internet enviroment and they can use upwork.
And on odesk, former upwork, a client ask me to work "online store management", actually they are fake identification goods seller, their server is also in panama. (banned but their sites can see on archive)
There are few credit check on these cool tech industries.
For AI tuning, margin revenue is the 1st priority. Credit check maybe difficult, AI can't dispute for their instructions.