Someone is pretending to be me • Hacker News Board

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#81

Post by darau1 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

Someone 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.

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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 have partnerships with US people and deliver our service to clients by pretending to be US developers. And we share profits with them. Our partners are satisfied with this business model.

Everything is perfect except on one thing. It's just the interview with clients. Normally in the interviews, the clients ask us some technical questions to see if we are able to deliver the service they expect. Because we are not native speakers, we are suffering from taking the interviews and many clients are passing by us even though they can get what they want. So we want a native interviewee and hope you are interested in this model.

Please let me know if you're interested in further discussion. Thank you!

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#82

Post by rngname22 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

They could be fully technically capable but unable to secure those jobs because of visas, location/timezone, the company having a prejudice against outsourcing/remote work, etc.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#83

Post by registeredcorn » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 5:58 PM UTC

>So we can see the 35 members in this Slack, but I don't feel comfortable posting that list. I have no idea who is real or fake and who may be working for this company unaware of what is actually happening.

>So I sent an email to two of them after I found them on LinkedIn to further help investigate this. One immediately responded unaware of this behavior occurring and left the group.

Although I admire the authors restraint, I am more than a little unimpressed with one of the contacted being "unaware" of the behavior. "Excuse me, did you know you're in a group that is actively committing crimes?" How do you think they're going to respond?

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#84

Post by vsareto » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #58

dctoedt wrote: post #17

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…

> 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. 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, knowl…

>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?

It's definitely a concern when you need to worry about spies infiltrating your company

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#85

Post by bogwog » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

mapmeld wrote: post #12

Bizarre. I (US-based engineer with an Upwork account) was invited into a less sophisticated variant of the scam in spring 2021: > Nice to meet you. I am looking for a US person who do business with me. You can earn money with a few cooperation. Do you know Upwork or Toptal site? They also had the text of the message in a GitHub repo. I tried reporting them to GitHub, Upwork, and Toptal, but I don't think they knew wh…

Same, although I was never asked to impersonate anybody. They just wanted to work using my real name/identity, and would throw some money my way every month. At the time I was annoyed/pissed, but after reading this I respect that they at least had the decency to ask for my permission lol.

Honestly, this is 100% Upwork's fault. Their platform is a race to the bottom, yet they make it very difficult/impossible for people from countries that can actually afford to make a living with those rates to sign up. So I understand why people resort to this behavior, even though I would never want to work with someone who would actually do that. Fuck those people.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#86

Post by mrandypratt37 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

I'm a US-based accountant who is currently interviewing for his first job in software and I was approached by someone on on LinkedIn about an opportunity. Seemed fishy, but figured I could risk 15 minutes. The person set up a meeting between me and a Taiwanese Developer for this exact thing. He said he had 7 years experience and had a contract drafted for he and I to become "business partner" where I would take the meetings and he would do the work for a 30/70 split. I told him, morals aside, that I didn't have the credentials to get into the jobs he would want and pointed out numerous obvious issues like in-person coding, etc.. He said he was ready to make a fake LinkedIn and had this whole operation planned out.

Seems to me like there is a whole operation around this business model of exploiting US developer salaries and the morality of a few Americans willing to try and make a dollar for free. Honestly more disappointed in the people accepting shady deals like this than the ones offering them.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#87

Post by suoduandao2 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

nonrandomstring wrote: post #58

dctoedt wrote: post #17

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…

> 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. 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, knowl…

I've simply asked candidates 'tell me about a time you had to make a moral judgement'. I'm kind of surprised that it's not a more common question, but of course that makes it work - truly immoral people would have a made-up anecdote if it came up regularly.

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#88

Post by karaterobot » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

Let's say that this happens with some regularity: an imposter is hired to take an interview on behalf of a third party who is obviously not the same person. Let's say that, some of the time, this ploy is successful and the third party is hired for the position. Don't they just get fired immediately? Is this entire scam just about getting a couple day's salary? Or do some employers just shrug and go with the flow?

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#89

Post by mistrial9 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

throwawaysleep wrote: post #45

hinkley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once pulled in to observe (in the “are you seeing this shit?” sense) an interview where someone off screen was answering questions and the person on camera was moving his lips. I’m not sure if they wanted me to share in the joke, or verify that there was no form of latency that would make lips and audio fail so badly to line up. I’m pretty good at pattern matching. There was no pattern. It was two guys pulling…

I did this for a friend to help him land a job. We got away with it.

(upvote) its encouraging to see real info like this here - especially when semi-anonymity supports that

Re: Someone is pretending to be me

#90

Post by dabernathy89 » Tue, Sep 27, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

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 devs only noticed because the client sent a calendar invite to his real email, instead of the one provided by the impostor.

[edit - I'm reading through the original post, and I see now that this was all done through Upwork as well. Yikes!]