How does a "you interview for US company, we do the work" scam work?
10 comments
·December 12, 2025tdullien
There's been an ongoing issue with North Korean state agents infiltrating SV companies, and this proposal helps them pass the interview process more easily.
There's multipronged benefit for them: Access to company infrastructure to potentially cause harm or ransom in the future, access to technology / intelligence, but also simply foreign currency.
nottorp
Not necessarily North Koreans only.
Anyone in a very low income area can benefit from pretending they're in a high income area and negotiating US-like pay.
Although the cancer stuff does look very scammy.
xnx
Not that complicated? The scammer gets a salary for a job they would not be able to get legally.
"Arizona woman to serve 8 years for identity theft scheme benefiting North Korea": https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5479906/north-korea-ide...
rasse
You should update your CV accordingly: "Likely to pass several technical interviews (as assessed by the North Korean Reconnaissance General Bureau)."
Nextgrid
There are generally 2 angles to it:
* malicious: hostile actors want to gain footholds into companies - North Korea, etc
* benign: people in lower income countries want to do the job and can make good profit even when giving half the salary to you.
For the second option, some are scams and only want to pocket a month or two of salary without delivering before the company fires them. Others actually deliver and can keep the arrangement going long-term.
bryanrasmussen
hmm, my ex-manager would probably appreciate these guys over me because I bet they never point out when someone is an idiot.
robotswantdata
You’ll pass the sniff test, they don’t.
Be careful they might try and use your identity to then commit more fraud.
pgsandstrom
Maybe they just want access to the specific companies? Like, you get hired by the company. You hand over username/password/vpn-info to them. Then they have a way inside the company and can try to steal information, install backdoors, whatever, with very low risk of getting caught.
Madmallard
I literally just got this email as well
ignoramous
Outsourcing your own job is quite a fraud business.
Recently my friend was approached by a Telugu broker stating that he would pay 10k for a part time job ... My friend agreed to a tech stack and he was connected with one of his US clients and he started sharing his screen and gave him his entire sprint's work.
There are thousands of such NRIs especially from Andhra, Telangana going to USA not learning anything about industry, these people have no coding knowledge, can't even explain their work properly to [3rd parties]. They [earn] 6 digit USD [and pay] these brokers some 40-50K Rupees [$6000] every month and outsourcing it to a jobless Indian. Brokers eat away most of the money and pay the end person around 10K.
The worst part, my friend said it would take around 40 hrs a month (2 hrs everyday) to complete this US client's sprint tasks, that's all (client works for a major MNC and is paid around 120k USD/year, while my friend gets 10k rupees/month, almost 1 percent of what client makes).
What the hell is even going in this industry? This is beyond fucked up.
Happy Labour's day
Got this scam email about an opportunity to earn passive income by acting as the front for an employment fraud scheme.
How does the scammer benefit from this operation?
I can think of 2 ways:
- Personal / private data mining, but this seems quite work intensive for that purpose - Actually going through with the whole scam and disappearing after first salary payments come through
Any other ideas? Anyone have experience or insight about this?
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Full email below:
"Hi <name>, I hope you’re doing well.
My name is <sender>, and I’ve been a software developer for over 7 years — mainly full stack, with a strong focus on frontend. I’m reaching out because I’m looking for someone to collaborate with, and I think you're the best one whom I'm looking for.
I used to partner with my friend Jim, and we worked really well together. Sadly, he was diagnosed with cancer about a month ago, and he advised me to find someone new to team up with. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.
Here’s the idea: I’ll handle sending proposals to companies, and you would take care of the interviews with recruiters. My English isn’t strong enough for U.S. interviews, so I’m looking for someone who is confident in English and also has strong technical knowledge. If we land a position, you’d receive a share of the monthly salary, while I would take care of the actual development work.
My initial suggestion is a 50/50 split of the salary after tax. For example, if a job pays $10K per month and taxes are 30% ($3K), the remaining $7K would be split evenly — $3.5K each.
I will manage all the proposals and keep you informed about interview schedules. If things work out and we join a team, I’ll handle the project development. Then you'll get profit every month without any work.
If this sounds interesting to you, please let me know — I’d really like the chance to work together.
Thank you, Best regards, <sender>"