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Someone is pretending to be me

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Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#61

Post by OkayPhysicist »

lazide wrote: post #50
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it could be "just" a scam though the arbitrage is really a scam too. The other thread's doesn't make sense because the dev is still trying to work despite being immediately id'ed as a different person on zoom. This scam only makes sense to me to be doing something like stealing the signing bonus but actually trying to be a dev is curiously naive or stupid.

If the scammers found a naive patsy to be the 'employee' and used an experienced dev to do the interview, it makes sense. At many companies, they wouldn't necessarily notice the difference right away too, if someone was pretending to work. Management is often overloaded or checked out. Depending on ethnicity, they might also be unwilling to bring up the issue. For example, if the patsy sticks with it, who is going to…

Pay out to whom? Surely the employment paperwork, the pay checks, the direct deposit forms would have to also be under the assumed name?

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#63

Post by pnw »

This reminds me of the time I agreed to hear a seed pitch from a Web3 company and they accidentally showed a slide where they had copied text from my LinkedIn profile onto their team slide under an unnamed VP that was "soft circled". The text was distinctive enough that I immediately recognized it and it couldn't have been any other person. I'd never met them before that call and wasn't looking for a job.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#64

Post by iLoveOncall »

ollien wrote: post #57

What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview on their own. Something's not adding…

It would take months for the company to figure out that the person is not doing anything, is not who they pretend to be, and fire them. Months during which that imposter would have been paid to do literally nothing.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#65

Post by jliptzin »

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.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#67

Post by ollien »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #64
ollien wrote: post #57

What I can't piece together here is what the scammer's endgame is. They land a cushy developer job under some false identity and ... then what? They're not going to pay some random college student to attend every meeting, are they? Even if they were, are they going to be able to maintain the level of work they lied about? If they really had those skills, they would just interview on their own. Something's not adding…

It would take months for the company to figure out that the person is not doing anything, is not who they pretend to be, and fire them. Months during which that imposter would have been paid to do literally nothing.

I guess at some company scale that would happen... you'd probably need pay someone to do onboarding for you (so you're not immediately flagged as a no-call-no-show), then you could go AWOL after that?

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#69

Post by CobrastanJorji »

fatjokes wrote: post #48
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #37

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…

Haha, when you put it like that, I can totally see why the interviewer was "awesome" and let the guy stay on. He was totally there for the drama.

Now that I think about it, I bet you could put together a pretty successful YouTube series of messing with zoom interviews in ways just like this. Get someone's identical twin to join the call and make them fight over who's the real one. Bring time travel into it. Make outlandish demands of the interviewer to prove that they're not a Zorblaxian spy.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#70

Post by darkwizard42 »

jliptzin wrote: post #65

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.

Also just ratchets the value of "old email accounts" up a ton. Reddit has a similar problem with fraud coming from old tenured accounts with karma (upvote points similar to HN) becoming very valuable and targets for hackers and spammers.

I don't know about new addresses, but it sounds like more robust vetting is needed on the interviewing side. Resumes and initial screens have become potentially stale and too easy to fake.

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