Here’s a story about a job candidate I interviewed who seemed to be engaging in some sort of AI-assisted fraud.
Before the interview even occurred, there was already suspicion around the candidate. A couple other interviewers observed a lag between the voice and video, and they thought this might be a sign of an AI generated video. And the resume felt way too perfect, claiming extensive experience in basically everything that we do.
I don’t know about the video lag. To the extent there are AI tools out there, I don’t presume to know how exactly they work, nor do I presume that I am capable of distinguishing AI video from a bad internet latency. So I took an approach that was different from other interviewers: I looked at his LinkedIn page.
His LinkedIn page was a major red flag for me. His resume listed jobs at several staffing companies, each time working for a different client company. His LinkedIn page lists the staffing companies, but does not list the client companies. So there was basically no information about what he did and who he worked for. I thought he was likely making fake resumes tailored to each job application by changing the identities of the client companies. His LinkedIn page was deliberately vague to avoid obvious contradictions. However, he was not very careful, and his LinkedIn page included an “about” section that mentioned expertise in healthcare. Healthcare wasn’t anywhere in his resume, so I planned to ask him about it.
I also found a Medium blog via one of his LinkedIn posts. It was one of those irritating professional blogs where people write about tech stuff not out of passion, but just to pretend that they’re actively engaged in the field they’re looking for work in. And it was very obviously AI generated. Hereabouts I’m one of the more “pro” AI folks, but this is a bad look, why would you advertise this about yourself? It doesn’t demonstrate knowledge or enthusiasm, it demonstrates an eagerness to show off, paired with a lack of anything to show.
I actively discussed this with the hiring manager, and there was back and forth about whether I should interview the candidate at all. Like, this is obviously great story material, but generating story material is not properly part of my job description. If he’s a fraud, the correct course of action is to not engage. But several other people interviewed him first, and nobody else seemed very confident about the fraud hypothesis. So I ended up having the interview.
From the very start, I asked him to introduce himself, and he listed client companies that did not match his resume! I pointed out the mismatch, and said we would discuss it later in the interview.
So the first part of my interview discussed a take home assignment that we assign to all candidates. I pick an arbitrary section of their work, put it up on a shared screen, and ask them to discuss what they did and why they did it that way.
Initially I showed a notebook, and asked him to confirm it was his. He confirmed. Then I said, oops my mistake, that’s from a different candidate. After I switched to the right notebook, I asked him to explain the section on screen. He started talking about the general assignment, but I interrupted saying, please talk about what’s on the screen right now, section 5?
Then he dropped the call.
Five minutes later, he came back on, and claimed he couldn’t see the shared screen. We wasted more time figuring out what to do about that, and I eventually got him to share his own screen. This was the only part of the interview that proceeded as normal, and although it’s not really relevant to this story, it is my opinion that even under good faith assumptions he was one of the worst candidates I’ve ever interviewed.
So next we discussed his resume. I confirmed again the contradiction between his story and the resume. He claimed that I had the incorrect resume! I said, so this isn’t you? Am I interviewing the wrong person? I sent him his own resume, and asked him to send me the correct one. He went silent for a bit, ostensibly to retrieve his resume. I never received the resume.
So I moved on and asked him to confirm that I had the correct LinkedIn page. I asked, “I saw on your LinkedIn that you have experience in healthcare, could you tell me about that?” He asked where I got that. I repeated, “It’s on your LinkedIn page.”
How do you think he got out of that one? I thought maybe he’d make something up about briefly working for a healthcare company, and claim that he left it out of the resume because it wasn’t relevant to the role he was currently interviewing for. Folks, that is not what he did.
Instead, he dropped the call, 5 minutes before the end of the interview. That was the last I heard from him.
Obviously it’s very funny how badly the scammer fucked up. It’s ego-boosting to me that I caught it.
But to be serious for a moment, it’s the wrong takeaway to think “scammers are easy to catch”. People get scammed because they’re overconfident in their ability to spot scams. When people get caught in a scam they have difficulty asking for help, because they think it’s embarrassing that they missed the scam to begin with.
This guy had been interviewed by four people before me, and none of them found definitive signs of fraud, even when they were looking for it. I respect my colleagues, so we may chalk it up to chance that it was obvious to me where it was not obvious to them. Maybe I was speaking to a different guy, and my guy was incompetent. Maybe screen-sharing is an interview technique that trips up current AI tools. And AI tools develop over time, so what worked for me may not work universally.
I’m guessing that this guy was part of a fraud ring. An employee for a company that tries to land jobs under false pretenses, in order to hand the jobs over to paying customers. He probably dropped the call a couple times in order to talk to a supervisor, that’s how he came up with the lie that screenshare was broken. I suspect that the paying customers are not actually getting a good deal, and are also being scammed. But what do I know?
So what’s the takeaway? I don’t know, scammers bad?
telling whether text is AI is one area where most people overestimate their abilities very badly. i saw a guy being haughty in a comment section, claiming not only that his opponent was obviously using AI, but that his day job involved telling this difference. to me, his opponent was obviously a slightly pretentious ESL speaker. who was right?
the AI transvestigator should pretty much get fucked whether he was right or not. even if his opponent was using an LLM, he was making cogent points that deserved to be addressed – unlike the creep you interviewed.
my job does involve talking with scammers often enough and i’d be lying if i said i had a 100% success rate sussing them out. con artists are pretty much my most hated category of scum in the world and i’d gladly strangle them to death.
my experiences with them have retroactively ruined the movie “the sting” for me. paul newman and robert redford will stay dead if they know what’s good for them.
christ i use pretty much like napoleon dynamite
Scammers aren’t easy to detect, and scamming evolves. It used to be that someone who could talk a good game had an advantage; help from an AI will leverage that advantage.
Way back before the internet (1987) I was with a tiny startup that hired someone who turned out to be a fraud. I don’t recall if I interviewed him (the company was maybe a dozen people), but if I did, I missed it. The references were hard to check, as the claimed PhD was from overseas (Turkey?).
It was only after we hired him and worked with him for a few months that it became clear that his resume wasn’t reflective of his abilities, and our management did some additional digging to determine that we shouldn’t have hired him.
I deemphasized the AI angle because:
1) Fraud predates AI. A candidate can bullshit using traditional methods, as with the anecdote from Some Old Programmer.
2) It’s common to use AI to generate resumes and take-home assignments. They’re allowed to do it. The important thing is they don’t misrepresent themselves, and they understand the material.
3) I think overfocusing on the AI isn’t the best path to fraud detection. IMO my colleagues were too caught up with the idea of identifying AI generated video, when we don’t even know that he was doing that! He could just be reading out an LLM response. The more perennial fraud detection method is validating against external information, such as LinkedIn.
another method could be strangling them .. i keed. my job being phone based there’s a lot of vibes, which is a sucky metric. fortunately a lot of them are incompetent. but if one was really good, would i ever know i’d been burned?
aside from vibes – stalling tactics like “bad connection” “can you repeat?” as they look up the info or type into the voice emulator. if they give you bank info and it’s for green dot or go2bank – a lot of poor folks with bad credit use those but they’re also favored financial institution of foreign organized crime. if they don’t have voice tech, demographic mismatch with their info – foreign accent on a person born in alabama. that one sucks because some people have high or low voices for their gender, younger or older sounding voices based on health, or were born in usa left and came back. once had a person with an angloafrican accent on the phone bc childhood missionary shit. another thing to watch for, with very young or especially very old or disabled people on the phone, is signs of coercion – distress, confusion, sound of someone else bossing them around or making veiled threats.
and romeo fraudsters getting their marks asking for itunes cards or bitcoin to help “get their ‘spouse’ out of trouble” in france/dubai/timbuktu. these are the con artists i most desire to murder.
I like to think I’ve seen enough AI-written text to have a sense of the way chatbots write. Once you’re familiar with them, they have a distinct cadence. I’m not claiming I can always tell, but there are some turns of phrase that just scream AI to me.
It’s so weird to me that people try to cheat their way into job interviews like this. Even if you fool the interviewers and get the job, what are you going to do then? Do they think they can keep using AI to do the job for them indefinitely?
Well, I have a report right now who is incompetent, has been on numerous PIPs, and shouldn’t be in the position. When I’ve documented his problems and looked to get him fired I’ve been told to continue try to improve his performance. Unofficially I get the feeling that the department keeps him around as the first one who will be laid off if upper management decrees layoffs. A sort of sacrificial goat as it were. Although he is filling a position of a senior engineer I have to meet with him every day in order to ensure he engages in the work he is assigned. I’ve offered to loan him to other managers when they say they need help, and the other managers refuse to take him. So, there are some places where once a person gets in, they don’t need to perform. These are getting fewer, but some still exist.
So why would someone use AI, or tools to make them look more knowledgeable than they are, in an interview? I can think of a few personality types who might.
First, there are a lot of people who are less than confident in their own abilities. So having a tool to confirm that they understand the interviewers question and what answer the interviewer may expect doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t do the job. They are just uncertain about their skills and are looking for confirmation. I remember being in an interview in 2009 after I was laid off from the market crash. At this in-person interview their chief engineer pulled out a drawing (paper drawings… I miss them), and pointed to a component on a schematic and said, “What does this do?” I looked at it, and said, “It looks like a reverse battery protection diode.” I was pretty certain that it was, but never having seen the schematic or design before it could well have had a function I was unfamiliar with. If it was an on-line interview, I might have been tempted to take a moment and look at some of the old schematics I’d worked on before.
Second, there are people, and there seem to be a lot of them who have a hard time getting or holding jobs, who have this inner conviction that there are secrets that successful people know but they are not taught. The “This One Trick Will Get You Any Job You Want!” type of secret. They are looking for that secret handshake, the special phrase, the key to success which they don’t know. This type of person is the target of the people who sell tips on how to pick-up women and how to make money on the stock market. I suspect there is overlap in the libertarian crowd, where also seems to be a feeling that the only reason they are not rich and powerful is because they are not privy to the secrets of the ruling cabal. In extreme cases they may end up as sovereign citizens.
Then, there may be a third category of people who have done this on their assignments all their lives. Who learned as they went through school that they can get an acceptable grade by cribbing off Google the night before the assignment is due. Tools which allow this have existed since time immemorable. Crib notes were mentioned in Tom Brown’s School Days, with the implication that they existed long before as one of the indispensable tools in the battle between students in teachers. However, our easy access to vast repositories of information (accurate or not) might have reached the point where for some people learning is not necessary. Even rote learning is no longer needed as the information can be looked up whenever it is needed. It used to be that a certain amount of rote learning was necessary simply because looking things up every time was impossible, but do children even learn their times-twelve tables any longer? Over the years I found that few people are actually skilled in thinking, it doesn’t come naturally to them, and they rely on the knowledge they learned by rote to get by. I’ve seen this is every place I’ve worked and in all the fields I’ve dealt with. And it is true that for a lot of jobs, following the SOP without thinking is all that is necessary. But in order to improve a task, in order to think about it, a person needs a certain amount of rote learned knowledge to actually think. There are few people who actually regularly think, it is work and there are a lot of tools available today which help the thinking-impaired. There is nothing wrong with following the SOP, and that works until something goes wrong. A good SOP will even have directions to follow with something does go wrong. Many people do lead full and satisfying lives without thinking. But it is possible that these people are now easier to spot, like in interviews, because the tools they use to avoid thinking are both ubiquitous and also more obvious when they are being used.
When I was in grade school, so many decades ago, we read a short story (which IIRC was by Asimov) about children taking aptitude tests. Everyone at a certain grade level took these tests, and that determined your future courses and career. (Yes, this would be a bad idea.) The best friend of our protagonist got their results back, and they were going to be an engineer designing bridges. The tests concluded that for this person, designing bridges would lead to a fulfilling and satisfying life. Our protagonist didn’t get any results back, and was feeling pretty bad about it. According to the tests, there was no skill or field which would be satisfying for them. His life would be a blank, and dismal. Until he was taken aside and told that while no one field of study would satisfy him, it was because the tests showed he was interested in everything, and those are the people who advance human knowledge, the people who, as an example, create new materials for the bridge builders to use.
Now this story stuck with me, because it suggests to me that many people do not think in the sense of always analyzing what they are doing and asking why. But it also stuck with me because of it’s falsehood, we all think, just not always about our jobs or family, or anything else. There are times we perform by rote, mechanically, and without thought. There are jobs where that is expected. But there are also times where every one of us thinks deeply about a subject, trying to find connections, or clear away the distractions, and find a route which may lead to greater happiness. I feel it is related to Whitman’s line from his Song of Myself, 51 where he writes, “I contain multitudes”. We all contain multitudes, skills, knowledge, abilities which are displayed to different friends and coworkers, or never displayed at all. We need a source of income to survive in this world, so even if we have no interest in something we need a job. It would be ideal if everyone had a job which reflected their interests, but that’s not possible. So we’ll get people who interview for jobs they have no interest in, and possibly even no knowledge of, in order to get the income they need to live. Businesses might be more efficient/creative if these people were not on the payroll, but the only way to make that happen is to find a way they can live happily without a job. That’s not something a head of a company would support, so they have to expect some people will get hired as deadwood. Mind you, the nations may have to figure something out in the next 40-50 years as there may soon be more people who need an income than there are jobs available.
Well. That’s about an hour of digesting my breakfast and typing. Time to get to the chores.
In my field, the skills are so specific and yet so well integrated into my colleagues’ work that it would be nearly impossible to fake your way through an interview, and chatbots tend to get the jargon slightly off.
I worry more about the administrators. There, they can babble through a lot of buzzwords and sound vaguely like they know what they are talking about. Confidence can carry you through that kind of interview!