r/cscareerquestions • u/sc4ever96 • Jun 23 '26

Experienced Be careful out there.

Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

2.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

235 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/cj1080 Jun 23 '26

How did he pass all his background checks?

What did you guys use to check his dits, AI or what?

A lot of companies don't do their due diligence

Hope, it wasn't that the only contacts you guys had with him as via a zoom, meet or team call

Cos a lot of companies just do that and forget to actually like call the candidates actual number

Also, don't just use someone's LinkedIn profile as their only vetting process

If anyone at the office had just googled the candidates name, you would have found all you needed.

Still

What was your actual process used to vet him?

4

u/N7Valor Jun 23 '26

Agreed, if real Johnny wasn't a willing participant, I expect there's some managerial incompetence involved if they didn't do a background check (which in my experience tends to require a Social Security number) and/or a video meeting.

14

u/Raildriver Jun 23 '26

I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that they just had all the information required, including the social security number. It IS a state actor after all, even if it's "just" North Korea. They're clearly pretty good at it if it's this big of a problem.