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/

It can very easily be illegal because most employment contracts I've seen include language that heads off this type of action.

That makes it a breach of contract, not illegal.

Making a contract with intent to defraud someone is not legal (i.e. pretending that you are going to work full time while knowing you are not going to do it).