Whenever I read these kinds of super-complicated scams, I can't help but think if the scammer would have instead invested all that time and effort into legitimate tech and interviewing skills, he/she could have just come in the front door! It's like the person who spends hundreds of hours putting together the perfect exam cheating scheme, where they could have instead put in half of that time actually studying!
No matter how much work you put into setting up a scam, you'll never be able to beat the H1B lottery.
Companies know that they can pay less money to people in poor countries because an American wage in a third world country would have them live like kings. Going the honest route significantly cuts your profits if you live in these countries.
The "Plamen" person linked in this blog says he was educated in Sofia and Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria. The average salary in Bulgaria ranges from $18k to $30k depending on the city (taking the optimistic route, here, sites like https://www.zaplatomer.bg/en/salaries-in-country give much lower numbers!); with an expected wage starting at $59k, they would be able to live a wealthy life earning twice the average wage just by getting lowballed by an American company. Spending that wage from a small California apartment wouldn't be nearly as profitable and comfortable as it would be living from a nice house in Bulgaria. All they'd need is a good internet connection and a shifted sleep schedule to take part in meetings.
That's assuming the guy can actually deliver on his tasks. My guess would be that these scammers have limited technical skills and rely on waiting for the slow evaluation process to fire them and then moving on to the next company.
In a lot of ways it's a convoluted form of arbitrage. These people "buy" developer labor in the cheap markets and "sell" in the expensive ones. Obviously bad when the developer labor doesn't get delivered as advertised. But if you can pull it off then mostly good for everyone.
The guy organising it appears to be living in a lower middle income country with technical skills limited to badly installing WordPress plugins and doubts about his spoken English.
Even if he actually has the capability to become a really good programmer, I'm not sure he's going to beat getting half of potentially dozens of US-based developers' contract incomes for less effort than spamming job boards and running a Slack channel
If the other thread [1] is to be believed there is no guarantee that the developers on the other side has similar skills. No need to dig up arbitrage when it could simply be a scam.
Even the person they hired here to pretend to be Connor said himself that's he's just a junior that would pretend to be a senior. Maybe the idea is simply to get a well-paid job, work a couple months, get fired (maybe even with a generous severance), and repeat.
Yeah it could be "just" a scam though the arbitrage is really a scam too. The other thread's doesn't make sense because the dev is still trying to work despite being immediately id'ed as a different person on zoom. This scam only makes sense to me to be doing something like stealing the signing bonus but actually trying to be a dev is curiously naive or stupid.
If the scammers found a naive patsy to be the 'employee' and used an experienced dev to do the interview, it makes sense.
At many companies, they wouldn't necessarily notice the difference right away too, if someone was pretending to work. Management is often overloaded or checked out. Depending on ethnicity, they might also be unwilling to bring up the issue.
For example, if the patsy sticks with it, who is going to call the bluff - especially if no one took a picture?
They could claim the manager was being racist by not being able to recognize them or something. If someone IS not great at recognizing/telling apart, say, Indians, it could sow doubt that would make it harder to address. And that is a lot of people in the US.
The longer the delay, and the more legal buttons get pushed, the more the company pays out before the scam is over, and the more lucrative it is.
It's not hard to find local cut-outs in most areas. In most cases, those folks are also patsies.
Another, different party who cashes checks written to their name in exchange for a cut, for example.
As an example, there is still the old in the tooth craigslist 'oops, I sent too large a cashiers check, can you send me the extra?' scam, which is an even more obvious ripoff, and people fall for that all the time.
If approached by law enforcement, their story would likely be they were working for X (different) company as an assistant or in finance, etc. The other company of course will be in a different state, country, or whatever, or maybe not actually exist, depending on the logistics of the money movement.
The scammers could easily have 10-20 different paychecks going to one person without anyone being the wiser - at least until the IRS got the W-2s or the cut-out started thinking about the long term consequences.
Scammers are used to a lot of churn with stuff like this, it's why these scams are hardish to run and aren't even more lucrative. Think breaking bad and 'Walt trying to ACTUALLY make money selling meth'. Lots of surprise expenses, people going sideways on you, competition you didn't expect, paranoia, logistics difficulties.
That's assuming they aren't just forging/stealing SSNs or identities and using some kind of front somewhere, like payday check cashing places willing to look the other way, or whatever.
There are plenty of folks running bad check scams or the like already, and they don't have the benefit of checks that will actually cash (all the time), like a big companies payroll check.
I wasn't even thinking about the fact that it leaves a paper trail. I was just thinking about the fact that the company who ostensibly hired "John Doe" is being given payment details for "Jack Frost".
It wouldn't be hard to have it be John Doe all the way through, at least for folks doing this. Setting up things like this is a common tactic in a lot of common financial crimes now a days.
