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

Another remote employment fraud that is much more prevalent is "Overemployment". You will get an applicant that is very skilled and hits the interview out of the park. But then when hired they are working many jobs and just trying to steal as many paychecks as they can until you fire them. They keep their first jobs resume clean and they all check out.

There is a Reddit community with over 400k members to show how prevalent this is [1]. There's lots of tactics like not allowing mentions on LinkedIn so they can't be publicly mentioned and seen by other unsuspecting employers, and just maintaining plausible deniability about why they can't make an on camera meeting. It is technically not illegal so it is very lucrative and hard to detect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/top/

And I think there are plenty of people who aren't even consciously intending to scam. A while back I interviewed somebody for a 100%-time contracting position that will convert to employment. His LinkedIn listed him involved in a couple of other companies that he started. When I asked about this glaring incongruity he looked startled and said that, yes of course he was shutting those down. It felt to me like a lie made up on the spot.

He struck me as somebody who was just overextended and flailing around for immediate cash revenue. So I think he had convinced himself he could do his two companies and a full-time job. But I expect that in practice he'd stint us on hours and be so sleep-deprived during them that he'd be somewhere between marginally and negatively productive until we fired him.

But then it's hard to tell the difference between a desperate schmuck and a scammer, as I think it's a continuum. A lot of out-and-out scams get started like that.