Candidate fraud is any hiring scheme in which the person a company assesses is not the person it ends up employing — through proxy interviewees, fabricated identities, manipulated video, or covert third parties operating behind a plausible persona.
The main types
Proxy interviewing. A skilled stand-in takes the interview.
Identity fabrication. Synthetic personas with generated photos and fabricated histories.
Interview manipulation. Face swaps, voice conversion, and real-time coaching during video interviews.
Covert-worker schemes. Real, skilled workers concealing who they are and where they work from — including sanctioned-state operations placing salaried workers inside foreign companies.
Detection signals
- Mismatches between voice/appearance across interview rounds.
- Refusal of camera or "broken camera" patterns at key stages.
- Lip-sync and lighting artifacts.
- Profile histories that don't triangulate.
- Day-one behavior inconsistent with interview capability.
Prevention
Identity verification at final round and offer, liveness checks during video interviews (see liveness detection), and a day-one continuity check tying the enrolled employee to the assessed candidate (see hiring fraud prevention).