Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions

"Flooding US companies"? I don't think so. The article lost my trust when it framed the North Korea incident like this:

> More than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea for IT work

"Impostors" implies that the people they hired couldn't do the job. That's not true: These were people who just faked their location/identity. They had the skills and worked for a long time for those companies. As far as the company was concerned, they were just regular employees. If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired.

If these "impostor" employees actually couldn't do the job and they somehow were able to stick around for as long as they did there's a different sort of crisis going on in "US companies" that has to do with management.

So one, I don't think you know what the word "impostor" means. If somebody faked your wife's identity, I think you could be reasonably upset even if she could "do the job" adequately, and it would be weird indeed to say she wasn't an impostor.

But two, are you serious with "If they couldn't do the job they would've been fired"? I think the most charitable assumption I could make is that you must not have been in the working world long. There are plenty of places that are bad noticing and getting rid of underperformers, even when everybody involved is well meaning. If somebody is actively running it as a scam, it could be hard indeed to detect. And really, they don't have to evade detection forever. Even a few months of paycheck may be more than enough for them to cover the costs of getting the jobs.