51–60 of 395 posts
A couple of weeks ago I received this email: "Hi, Billy How are you? I checked your Codementor account, it is great. I am *** **** from Ukraine. I am 32 and I am also a computer programmer. I want someone who can help me. Would you lend me your account? If you borrow it, I can earn a lot of money. I will pay 100 usd every month. Regards."
I've never had anyone try to impersonate me for a job, but I have had people steal my photos and create Tinder profiles using them in cities I don't live in (I've been alerted because people who recognized me sent me screenshots). I tried to catfish the person who was using my photos to catfish others, but was unsuccessful. I dreamed of doing what Connor did, which was to confront the person who was using my face on a video call.
I'm so sorry this happened to Connor but am grateful he documented this sort of scam, which I fear is probably a lot more common than we know. I see people on TikTok all the time encouraging these sorts of outsourcing scams of taking jobs on Upwork or something else and then hiring people to do the work on Fiver or in markets where the cost of labor is much, much lower. Do this with enough volume and you could make decent money, I imagine.
But how utterly distasteful for the victim.
Scam is rampant on LinkedIn. I'm getting constant connection requests from obviously fake profiles with AI generated faces.
This 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…
And I doubt there would be too many legal or corporate ramifications from allowing someone else to be on the call with their camera off. These are contractor positions, not full-time. Frankly, it's a risk I would take to be able to witness this sort of thing in real-time.
Wow. This is creepy. Props to the interviewer for allowing the real Connor to stay on the interview and observe. This is one of my big problems with LinkedIn. We put so much information out there in public, it’s really easy for people do do this. That information can also be used for things worse than applying for jobs. I think small companies hiring freelancers are most vulnerable to this. In the UK at least compani…
This is one of the many reasons I don't dilvulge anything on LinkedIn and merely use it as a funnel to my contact page on my own site.
Something's not adding up
I hope Andrew [0] — the college junior with morals who blew the whistle on the attempt to get him to impersonate the author — gets an internship or job offer out of this; he apparently was having a hard time with that. The author's sleuthing is reminiscent of Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg from 1989. [1] [0] Andrew blogs at https://unfooling.com/ , according to the article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cucko…
Excellent point.
I've been wondering about ways to test students on "trust/morals" and decided its one of the most valuable yet least well understood qualities. Employers generally rank skills, knowledge, salary, even age/gender/race above dependability/loyalty, or barely consider the latter at all.
Other than lengthy vetting and imprecise security clearance procedures this is such a hard quality to discern, and so costly when you miss the mark. The costs of defection, industrial espionage, and sabotage seem poorly quantified in HR. I think a corrosion of work relations has come about from devaluation of workers qua humans, and the corresponding disrespect people have towards their places of work. Is that inevitable under capitalism/efficiency?
And, harder question... does it even matter? Especially once AIs and remote agents take-over many jobs? Does a corporation care if the worker is an imposter and liar who abused a false identity to get the post, so long as they produce working results?
Is there a kind of moral Turing test here? What do work relations have to do with human-relations in the limit of the present trajectory?
Like all scams and spam, if it didnt work then people wouldnt do it. But I am struggling to see how it will work.
Sometimes just the possibility of it working, and the person's desperation, will cause them to try it. I've heard enough instances of people paying others to take exams for them that it doesn't surprise me that some people trying to do an interview that way, too. They think just getting the job will do something for them, and (for whatever reason) think they'll be able to keep the job once they have it. I wouldn't be…
Back in the 90s I was becoming a math teacher at one university while I was working on getting admitted into an IT engineer course at another. Strangely enough, the other admittance exam besides math was physics and I sucked at that while obviously I was far ahead in math compared to my peers at the physics preparation course. So someone offered an astonishing amount of money to take the math entrance exam for them, enough to buy a small apartment with it -- and perhaps I would've been young and foolish enough to go with it except for one fact: they offered a falsified national id to go with it. That's five years in prison if you get caught with it and I noped the hell out of it...
In the case OP describes, the situation is similar: it's the documentation that catches you.
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…
One of my first employees was doing fantastic work, until his performance fell to 0 - no communication, no deliverables, nothing. Turns out, he stopped paying the subcontractor that was doing his job for him.
The subcontractor contacted me months after I fired the employee and confessed. Apparently, the long-pauses and loud typing during my conversations with the employee was the employee messaging the subcontractor asking for help answering my questions.
So, in my case, the employee was still the front. In this case, they're attempting to eliminate that bottleneck by just having the subcontractor impersonate the employee.