Fake Job Seekers Are Flooding US Companies (cnbc.com) 63
Fake job seekers using AI tools to impersonate candidates are increasingly targeting U.S. companies with remote positions, creating a growing security threat across industries. By 2028, one in four global job applicants will be fake, according to Gartner. These imposters use AI to fabricate photo IDs, generate employment histories, and provide interview answers, often targeting cybersecurity and cryptocurrency firms, CNBC reports.
Once hired, fraudulent employees can install malware to demand ransoms, steal customer data, or simply collect salaries they wouldn't otherwise obtain, according to Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop Security. The problem extends beyond tech companies. Last year, the Justice Department alleged more than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea, including major corporations across various sectors.
Once hired, fraudulent employees can install malware to demand ransoms, steal customer data, or simply collect salaries they wouldn't otherwise obtain, according to Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop Security. The problem extends beyond tech companies. Last year, the Justice Department alleged more than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea, including major corporations across various sectors.
fake applicants for fake jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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This may indicate that the number of fake jobs is declining.
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Having spent a few years in the past applying over and over again to jobs that looked great, but never seemed to be filled -- I can say that I am very happy the fake job market is getting a taste of the fake applicant flood.
It could not happen to a more deserving bunch for wasting millions of hours of people's time for data harvesting or some twisted tax break they were scamming. They all should have been fined and the class action money going to job seekers.
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What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody seemed to mind when companies did this to potential workers. I'm sure they'll just bear with it and understand that "it's just how the world works now," like they told me.
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Bots hiring bots, how perverse! [youtube.com]
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Nobody seemed to mind when companies did this to potential workers. I'm sure they'll just bear with it and understand that "it's just how the world works now," like they told me.
If the fake applicants simply ghosted the companies, no one would be talking about this. It's the malware and security vulnerabilities that are the problem. If companies posted fake job openings with the intent to attack applicants, that would be a similar thing and would be a big story.
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Those fake jobs ARE an attack on applicants. They cost time, effort, and money.
Re: What's good for the goose... (Score:2)
And morale. This furthers emotional distress already experienced by job seekers with little hope.
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If companies posted fake job openings with the intent to attack applicants, that would be a similar thing and would be a big story.
They are, and it does make the news. [bitdefender.com]
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Ultimately, nobody wins here.
Oh how the turns have tabled (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't say I sympathize much, since companies have been posting fake job listings [cnbc.com]:
I wonder if the phrase "real knows real" has a counterpart "fake knows fake"...
Two AIs walk into a bar... (Score:5, Funny)
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Third AI walks into the bar and is strutting, all proud of itself. Upon witnessing the AI bragging about job postings, and the other job applications, the third AI ask the human bartender for a double.
"What's got you so glum?" Ask the two AI.
"My job is to scrape job listings and applications to learn about human interactions and the employment market from humans."
Then they all get on social media and comment about how everything is fake now. Also, the current troubles in the stock market and US trade are go
Fake students (Score:2)
I was just reading how fake students are flooding community colleges in CA to scam them out of financial assistance money.
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Good luck with that. My buddy is on a FA program in CA. They pay a fixed rate for tuition directly to the college, and he still owes the difference plus some weird sounding insurance.
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I was just reading how fake students are flooding community colleges in CA to scam them out of financial assistance money.
If your accounting processes are THAT fucked when your product is a human graduate, then you probably deserve every scam coming to you,
Then again, this is an institute of higher learning in liberal America. That itself, has become the scam.
Meet someone in person? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get why they don't just meet somone in person before hiring. Even without any AI you can thoroughly fake a remote interview. You can do that in person too (by sending a different person), but there is more risk involved for the individual. Especially if you do ID checks.
Why not meet them in person? Too much work. (Score:3)
That would require, like, actual work. Ew.
Seriously though, HR departments at major companies have been striving for decades now to automate as much as possible and do (apparently) "sod tout" when it comes to actual in-person HR work. Actually meeting candidates in person would potentially require additional HR staff, as well as backtracking on years and years of earnest effort at "savings" for the C-suite types.
Re:Why not meet them in person? Too much work. (Score:4, Insightful)
That would require, like, actual work. Ew.
Seriously though, HR departments at major companies have been striving for decades now to automate as much as possible and do (apparently) "sod tout" when it comes to actual in-person HR work. Actually meeting candidates in person would potentially require additional HR staff, as well as backtracking on years and years of earnest effort at "savings" for the C-suite types.
Why still call it Human Resources then? The company lawyer knows exactly why they have a corporate job. HR is quickly being reduced to that level of necessity in business. Sounds like they are now on the payroll for legal reasons/mandates only too.
Which ironically means they’ll be replaced by AI sooner than they assume pulling that hands-off shit. When HR reduces their interaction, they directly reduce their justification to exist. The FUCK do I need them for.
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That would require, like, actual work. Ew.
Seriously though, HR departments at major companies have been striving for decades now to automate as much as possible and do (apparently) "sod tout" when it comes to actual in-person HR work. Actually meeting candidates in person would potentially require additional HR staff, as well as backtracking on years and years of earnest effort at "savings" for the C-suite types.
Why still call it Human Resources then? The company lawyer knows exactly why they have a corporate job. HR is quickly being reduced to that level of necessity in business. Sounds like they are now on the payroll for legal reasons/mandates only too.
Which ironically means they’ll be replaced by AI sooner than they assume pulling that hands-off shit. When HR reduces their interaction, they directly reduce their justification to exist. The FUCK do I need them for.
HR's job is not to vet and hire candidates... Hell every company who's vetted me has outsourced that job to a company that is pretty useless (I.E. just directed me to fill out some forms and couldn't even google for themselves)... HR's job is to protect the company and it's directors from it's own employees.
With that in mind, the less HR have to do with hiring the better. If you want to hire good people, you need someone who knows the job doing the hiring. They don't need to know the minutiae, but do nee
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I don't get why they don't just meet somone in person before hiring.
Guess that depends on the age of HR and hiring.
(I mean the literal age of those running HR and hiring.)
It would appear the Introvert Generation is earning their moniker in spades. Texting and email are the preferred methods of pseudo-communication now. Talking on a phone has become that thing older generations can do without a prescription.
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I only talked on phones during my last high school year, when class mates asked be about science stuff.
In general, I picked up my bike and rode to them and explained stuff in person.
With paper and a pen.
That was 1987.
Since then the minutes I used a phone for talking summed up together are less than 100. I guess.
I hate talking on a phone.
If you like it: up to you.
And no, I have no particular reason to hate it. I just simply hate it. So if you call me without emailing me first - and that means making an appoi
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Re:Meet someone in person? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't get why they don't just meet somone in person before hiring.
Hold up. Are you actually suggesting that an employee be forced to come into the office, even for only one interview? All right guys, you know the drill. Mod parent down to hell.
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As a prospective employee, I'd definitely want to go to an in-person interview in the company, even for a full-remote position. You know, just to make sure the company is not fake...
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And to get a good look at the mood of the place. Are the employees happy, or does everyone look like a zombie? Is the building dim and decrepit? That's not a good sign either...
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That would be the sensible thing - the minimal amount of due diligence an organisation can do before hiring somebody is meet them and verify who they are. Maybe that interview happens in a satellite office, or in the presence of a trusted intermediary in their home country like a public notary. But at least some effort.
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The summary and the article expressly state that these are remote positions. We're talking about people abroad, sometimes on the other side of the globe. It's almost impossible to interview them in person. Even more so for US positions, which requires the visitor to pass through a lengthy visa process.
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The summary and the article expressly state that these are remote positions. We're talking about people abroad
Hiring remote employees and hiring employees abroad are two separate items. For the most part these scams are for jobs that are for people that are supposed to be in the US but in fact they fraudulently only claim to be and in fact are not. Hence why the article says "The worker used AI to alter a stock photo, combined with a valid but stolen U.S. identity, and got through background checks". This is the typical case as salaries in the US is much better. So they claim to be someone in Ohio while they are in
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In the case of actually intentional employees abroad, I guess you never hired an employee in a foreign country? Because you are practically always going to have a local company hiring the employee, either as a subsidiary or a middle-man. That local company can meet up with the person in question for you. Of course you should make sure you can trust that local company.
Actually, I'm not from the US but I've been interviewed six times (and hired twice) for US companies. Only two times the interviewer was from my own country and even then we were separated for more than 600 miles. So meeting in person was out of question.
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You were an employee or a contractor? If you were an employee were you paid straight from the US or by an intermediary company?
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Contractor both times, paid directly by the US companies.
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Years ago, I worked at a company that had won a major contract, and need to staff up rapidly. They had over 150 open positions, and at the annual town hall meeting, all the CxO types talked about the referral bonuses that were being offered, etc., and they really wanted people to spread the word.
They were not only looking for generalists, they had some specific skill sets, some of which were rare. As it turned out, I had a friend with one of those skill sets. He wasn't actively looking, but his current cont
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- Make the applicant do all the work on the HR Portal. And if some candidates get frustrated on the company site and decide not to apply, so much the better. On
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Meeting in person doesn't provide any more assurance of the person's realness, than can be done remotely. AI isn't so good that it can conduct a video interview, making you believe that the image is a real person. AI video is good, but not that good. And background checks, if done right, can go a long way towards validating the authenticity and credentials of a candidate.
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Meeting in person doesn't provide any more assurance of the person's realness, than can be done remotely. AI isn't so good that it can conduct a video interview, making you believe that the image is a real person. AI video is good, but not that good. And background checks, if done right, can go a long way towards validating the authenticity and credentials of a candidate.
Well it kind of is that good, have you seen the videos online of it? But that's not what I said: I specified in my comment 'even without AI'. The typical way is just having someone else do the interview.
That's super easy with remote and the actual interviewed person has zero risk to themselves. When meeting in real life that comes with much more cost and risk, especially since often they aren't even in the country that they are claiming to be in. It really does add a huge hurdle to the scammers.
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No, it's not that good. The videos online have been produced. Effort was put into the quality. Sure, AI may have generated portions, or even the majority, of the videos, but not in real time, and not without human crafting.
What I was reacting to, was your notion that in-person interviews is a cure for faking it, AI or not. Meeting someone in person doesn't really help that much, compared to what you can do with remote interviews.
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No, it's not that good. The videos online have been produced. Effort was put into the quality. Sure, AI may have generated portions, or even the majority, of the videos, but not in real time, and not without human crafting.
This is a just bad one that got caught: https://x.com/kannthu1/status/... [x.com] . Yeah you or I would catch this but they only need 1 person to fall for it out of like 100. This stuff is happening at enormous scale. They are in some foreign country, there is nothing that can be done about it remotely.
Meeting someone in person doesn't really help that much, compared to what you can do with remote interviews.
Ok you are in burma and your friend just aced your job interview while claiming to be a US citizen in California. Now you get invited in person to meet someone in SF in the coming days and they tell you they will ID
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Somebody who falls for that AI thing in your X link, deserves to be snookered. There is definitely something "off" about that video. I'm not surprised that the interviewer picked up on it being fake.
Fair (Score:2)
Okay, I shall say this again.
If you want to hire without fear of discrimination, then you should do this:
People submit their application, they are edited by HR to remove age, gender, etc. and you select for interview by a blind panel who just go from the edited applications.
When it comes time to interview, you SEND YOUR HR PERSON to the other person. If that means flying them out or driving out to them... do so. They can then do their usual paperwork, identification checks, etc. and also account for anyth
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This is not how the employment AI's work. They are designed to _seek out_ clues about age, gender, race, health, and the other factors that profoundly affect job performance but are illegal to admit are used to discriminate. They're baked into the training data though "following the algorithm" provides plausible deniability.
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The more normal way is: make a Skype (RIP) or Zoom/Teams interview: with the team that actually needs your expertise.
In a certain sense: I have no clue what HR is good for.
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We are going to administrate ourselves into the ground, and we are half way there. Weren't computers supposed to make all this easier and cheaper? Yea that was a lie, it only accomplished the opposite.
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How much money do you think is wasted on a SINGLE scam employee when it comes to light, or someone with no ability to do the job who cheated their way into the position, or is just no good at the job but talked their way in because they were briefly on the same golf course but now you can't sack them?
Take that AI recruiters ... (Score:1)
... for your lazyness not to actually comnunicate with real people.
I hear Shopify are hiring. (Score:2)
Just sayin'.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/08/1518213/shopify-ceo-says-staffers-need-to-prove-jobs-cant-be-done-by-ai-before-asking-for-more-headcount
So less.. (Score:2)
Fake employes for Fake Jobs Perfect Match (Score:2)
dead internet theory once again (Score:2)
Fake job postings.
Fake applicants.
live by the sword (Score:2)
Live by the sword, die by the sword. You demand online applications that are reviewed by AI, now you are going to get online applications generated by AI. Can only laugh.
Fake news (Score:1)
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It doesn't have to be this way (Score:2)