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

AI generated recruits are a fiction. That's not to say there aren't fake or bait and switch recruits but this idea makes no sense.

Some background. I'm a senior developer who has performed hundreds of interviews and seen dozens of questionable recruits long before AI. Typically the scam is that an offshore consultancy wants to place some roles to collect wages. Many of these agencies are from collectivist cultures, so in the mind of the agency, they all work in our project. This may not be true, but the agency sees the position as theirs, not the recruit's. So they typically don't the issue with putting recruit A in front of the interviewer and then slotting recruit B in after the position is secured. I've seen this done with A talking while B moves their lips on camera. Now with chatGPT (and earlier to some degree with just Google Search) we just see applicants eyes focused on something they're reading when we ask questions. All of this is just as easy as an AI generated applicant (if not easier) and quite likely to get the recruit hired.

A lot of this narrative is pointing the finger at China, North Korea and Russia/Ukraine. The best candidates I've fielded have been Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese. These are countries well known for their tech sectors. North Korea has executed the largest crypto heists in history. These are not groups who need to fake it.

So who does this narrative serve? It serves the RTO CEOs. This makes CEOs scared to hire remote workers and lets the ones who demand it have a reason.

If anything the panic around AI should reinforce the need to think critically about these things.

We're hiring for a software engineer right now. The amount of time our single HR professional has had to invest in sorting through scam candidates is ungodly. We had someone apply to the job three times, using different names and resumes each time. We've had two candidates who we suspected were responding to questioning with an AI tool that was listening to the interviewer's voice (poorly, which might be the only reason why we caught them). We had one candidate who said they were on the east coast, but upon further investigation, the person didn't exist; and following a hunch, upon casually bringing up that it seemed pretty dark where they were at, they disconnected from the call and we never heard from them again.

If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.