update: we have been infiltrated by a proxy interviewer crime ring

Remember the letter-writer whose company had been infiltrated by a proxy interviewer crime ring? Here’s the update.

Thank you so much for publishing my letter. A special thanks to everyone who said it wasn’t a fake letter (perhaps I spend too much time on Reddit where everything is labeled fake.) Part of the reason I said that was that before writing in, I ran this situation by a friend who is head of cybersecurity at a casino and he was just as floored as I was by the whole thing. I guess we all know better now.

I am so sorry I wasn’t able to engage in the comments. It was posted at the end of the quarter which is always crazy and I don’t think I even saw it until several days later. I am not going to name the actual country, but I will say with absolute certainty it was NOT North Korea or anywhere in Asia that the Fakeistan employees were from.

Things got a little crazy before they got better. The Fakeistan employees worked for the rest of the week while HR, Legal, and IT all go involved. As I mentioned, we had to pull every employee we had hired over the last year over video and send screenshots for comparison. Ironically one employee who had a Fakesitan surname and very slight accent was determined to be legitimate but had to have multiple audits to be sure. I’m not sure they even know how closely they were being watched. We were told to use any pretense to pull them into meetings and screenshot their faces for comparisons to their interview recordings. For the employees I knew would pass, it was easy. For my two Fakeistan employees, I literally threw up from anxiety because I felt so bad. I know it had to happen, I know they were in the wrong, but it just hurt. Especially with them thanking me profusely after the meeting for all of my help and saying how much they loved working at our company.

I will never absolutely know exactly what happened since I’m way too far down in the org chart to be privy to what we did find, but I do believe that commenter Specks got it right: I don’t think they were trying to steal information, just trying to get jobs and what many commenters mentioned, probably giving a cut of their paycheck to whomever facilitated that for them as they all worked a lot of overtime any time we offered it, so possibly a set limit of debt they were trying to get out of. I was told that their documents, upon closer review, didn’t match. I asked if IT could verify if they were using VPNs and weren’t even actually in the states, but no one knows except for IT. I do think they were in the U.S. (why would everyone pick the same state if not?). I just think they were people who, if we interviewed them as themselves, we probably would not have hired. Thankfully my own boss stepped in with HR to drop the ax on them and the managers didn’t need to be involved. They were read a three-sentence message crafted by the legal department who was very clear on not deviating from it in any way. We did acknowledge the reason for the departure (fraudulent identities) and they all pretty much were like “okay, yeah” once they realized we knew. The ones we couldn’t get ahold of right away were locked out of their computers by IT instantly in case they did know each other, even though they had never given any prior indication of such.

As for what we are doing moving forward, I did forward the links that Madame Desmortes posted (fascinating and validating read!) over to my boss. We now have several new procedures in place. A good one is that the training manager now has access to all interview recordings and reviews them before the training class starts.

One I’m a bit torn on is we have instituted an AI filter in our hiring platform that auto rejects any candidate without a digital footprint (i.e., no LinkedIn, no Facebook, no Instagram, etc.) I … don’t love it and think that we are probably rejecting candidates who may not use the same name on their resume as they do on social media and unfairly targets people who have a name change due to divorce/marriage, people who are in the midst of transitioning and people who just don’t have social media accounts under their “government” names that they may put on a resume. Since this whole situation went all the way up to the CEO, I don’t think I have enough capital to push back on it, so I have to let it go.

There were a couple Fakeistan surnames who were in resume review when this happened, but never made it to the screening. After that I have not seen any more come through, so whoever was running the whole operation must have realized we figured it out and gave up.

I still see their names on reports that I pull up and I remember how happy they were to work here, how well they processed and implemented feedback, and how quickly they became valuable assets despite their rough starts. It makes me sad every time. I hope they’re doing as well as they can. I hope they’re safe. There’s really no happy ending, just a valuable lesson and a humbling reminder of what a privilege it is to go through life on easy mode because of where I was born.

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