Professionals in high-demand industries are accustomed to receiving messages from job recruiters. Often the messages are generic offers sent en masse

EXCLUSIVE: Inside the global ghost worker industry that’s taking thousands of American tech jobs

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2024-09-30 07:30:03

Professionals in high-demand industries are accustomed to receiving messages from job recruiters. Often the messages are generic offers sent en masse without any apparent regard for whether the recipient has the requisite experience. Since the pandemic normalized remote work across the globe, tech workers have been getting recruited for a different type of job entirely: doing interviews under fake names for foreign companies.

“Fraudulent candidates have increased after COVID in 2020 because remote work [has] become the standard rather than a nice to have,” said Gabe Greenberg, founder of G2i, a talent marketplace matching remote engineering teams with freelance software developers. “So it’s increased the opportunity level for folks to take advantage of a system that wasn’t ready for the almost overnight shift to remote work.”

In May 2022, U.S. Departments of State and Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an advisory to alert the international community, the private sector, and the public to attempts by North Korea and North Korean information technology (IT) workers to obtain employment while posing as foreigners.