Candidate fraud is escalating due to remote work and AI, forcing TA teams to defend against threats from sophisticated fraudsters to state-sponsored attacks.
This comprehensive guide outlines everything you need to know about the more severe types of fraud: the risks, real examples, and most importantly, actionable steps to protect your company.
Candidate fraud is exploding—AI, remote work, and deception are reshaping hiring.
From bots to deepfakes, candidate fraud is evolving fast—learn the risks hiding in plain sight.
Learn how to detect fake candidates with subtle signs across resumes, interviews, and online profiles.
Proactive hiring tips to detect and prevent candidate fraud early.
Fraud is happening, it’s sophisticated, and even vigilant companies can be targeted.
Get the complete training guide to detecting and safeguarding against fake candidates.
Hiring a fraudulent candidate goes far beyond the frustration of a bad hire. The consequences can ripple throughout an organization, impacting finances, security, and reputation, and can be magnified particularly for organizations handling highly sensitive data (e.g. healthcare, financial institutions) or critical infrastructure (e.g. utilities, military, etc).
Using AI to generate and submit thousands of tailored resumes and cover letters. While often driven by desperation rather than malice, this floods systems, wastes recruiter time, and can obscure genuinely qualified candidates.
Leveraging AI for assessments, coding tests, or real-time answer generation during interviews. This misrepresents a candidate’s true abilities, potentially leading to costly mishires and performance issues.
Having someone else (an impersonator) conduct interviews OR using sophisticated “deepfake” technology where the person on screen appears to be talking, but their words are generated by AI or spoken by someone else off-camera.
Placing individuals within companies with specific, malicious intent to steal data, intellectual property, or funds, or to install malware. These complex operations are often run by criminal organizations or malicious governments like North Korea.
Developing a “spidey sense” for potential fraud is crucial. While many of these signs could have innocent explanations (beware of false positives!), they warrant further investigation.
Train your team to watch for:
Awareness is the first step, but proactive measures across the hiring lifecycle are essential. Here’s a step-by-step approach:
These stories underscore the reality: fraud is happening, it’s sophisticated, and even vigilant companies can be targeted.
The U.S. Justice Department uncovered a scheme affecting over 300 companies, including major retail and tech firms, generating nearly $7 million for fake IT workers, likely linked to North Korea.
KnowBe4, a company specializing in security awareness training, unknowingly hired a North Korean IT worker using a stolen American identity. They sent him a workstation, which he immediately began loading with malware. Luckily, he was caught before major damage occurred.
A company hired a fraudulent North Korean employee who infiltrated systems and downloaded information. After being caught and fired, the individual demanded a ransom payment to prevent the release of the data.
“No longer are they just after a steady pay check, they are looking for higher sums, more quickly, through data theft and extortion, from inside the company defenses.”
Even we at BrightHire encountered a suspicious candidate for a back-end engineer role. The applicant had an unusual name for his accent, gave a lengthy, overly rehearsed background story, but then became stumped and audibly seemed to be searching for an answer when asked a simple follow-up question (“Where were you before Amazon?”). Throughout the interview, pauses, keyboard noises, and increasingly evasive responses raised major red flags.
Candidate fraud is no longer a niche problem; it’s a significant and growing threat impacting organizations of all sizes, globally. From AI-powered cheating to sophisticated state-sponsored infiltration, the methods are evolving, and the potential damage is substantial.
Talent Acquisition teams are now guardians at the gate, playing a critical role in protecting their organizations. By fostering awareness, training teams to spot red flags, implementing robust verification processes throughout the hiring lifecycle, and leveraging technology thoughtfully, companies can significantly mitigate their risk.
Don’t let your organization become the next victim. Stay informed, stay vigilant, and build strong defenses against the rising tide of candidate fraud.
Report suspicious activity: If you suspect you’ve encountered fraud, especially involving potential North Korean actors, report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.IC3.gov.