Fake Candidates Are Getting Better. Is Your Hiring Process Keeping Up?

By BenchmarkIT On June 25, 2026 · In Hiring Advice

Updated: July 2, 2026

There’s always been a bit of detective work in any candidate search, but even seasoned sleuths struggle to spot today’s fake candidates with the naked eye.  

In the past, imposters could lie on a resume or LinkedIn profile, but their disguise would crumble during the interview and background screening processes. Now, remote work, generative AI teleprompters, interview proxy services, deepfakes, and other tools make them nigh undetectable, sometimes even after the hire.  

And the problem is only getting worse. Gartner predicts that as many as one in four candidate profiles worldwide could be fake by 2028. GetReal Security discovered that 41% of organizations with 1,000 people or more hired and onboarded a fake candidate. The evolving tools and techniques of digital trickery are making it easier to deceive hiring managers, unless they have their own secret weapons.  

In our experience, any growing enterprise needs the right AI screening tools (Alex AI, Ropes, and others) along with experienced recruiters in their arsenal if their hiring process is going to separate real candidates from the fakes, and good enough from the truly great. But first, you need to understand who you’re really up against.  

What Motivates Fake Candidates?  

If you’ve researched the spike in fake candidates, one nation is notorious for an almost indefatigable army of fake candidates: North Korea. News outlets relish in the fact that North Korean operatives, using fake social security cards or even the real IDs of American collaborators, are earning millions annually, which they funnel to the DPRK’s military budget. It’s sensational and real, a rare overlap, but it’s not the whole story.  

From the experiences of our recruiters and conversations with experts, it’s clear that fake candidates have a variety of motivations. Getting to know the motivations of these too-good-to-be true candidates can help you recognize the warning signs. 

Total Fakes 

These are fake candidates in the vein of North Korean agents: offshore IT workers pretending to be onshore candidates. In addition to fake candidates from the Hermit Kingdom, highly skilled workers from China and Russia also use a combination of VPNs, RMM tools, and deepfakes to bluff their way into high-paying tech jobs. Motives range from corporate espionage and cyberattacks to simply making American wages without waiting in queues or jumping through regulatory red tape for H-1B visas.  

Borrowed Identities 

Foreign operatives aren’t the only ones running this play. Some U.S. citizens have figured out how to get their own cut from fraudulent schemes.  

Ken Schumacher, CEO and Founder of Ropes, an AI-native technical assessment platform, sees this happen with remote work. “These fake candidates are real people with real U.S. IDs. They just don’t know how to code, practice DevOps, or oversee accounting. Their role is to get the job and outsource their identity. One person might have three to five jobs at a time, divvying out their work to overseas workers who complete tasks overnight.”  

These schemes may eventually unravel the moment the employee is called into the office, but by then, the damage is already done, leaving the company scrambling to backfill the role.   

Embellished Skills 

Not every fake candidate is a complete fabrication. Some IT workers embroider their resume, going beyond aligning their resume with job requirements to inflate their work history. In fact, Resume Genius discovered that 36% of 1,000 job seekers feel comfortable including a skill on their resume that they have yet to learn. It’s getting to the point where this tactic has a name: they’re calling it skills manifesting. 

Sylvia Bier, Senior Technical Recruiter at Benchmark IT, had this to say about these types of fake candidates: “People are bold. They’re desperate. They’re trying really hard to stand out, but it’s not working for them. So, they try to game and beat the system.”  

Even if some of these candidates are able to learn on the job, their lack of honesty upfront creates blind spots in your internal capabilities that backfire spectacularly. You don’t want these candidates to fake it until they make it on your dollar.  

How Fake Candidates Pull It Off 

The fake candidate playbook has expanded well beyond a doctored resume. Mariah Szarek, Director of Recruiting at Benchmark IT, captured just how much fake candidates have changed: “Since Benchmark IT has been in business for 19 years, we’ve been able to build a database of hundreds of thousands of candidate profiles. With our records dating back to 2007, we have the unique ability to compare previous versions of a candidate’s resume with their current experience. This long-term perspective helps us better understand career progression and validate experience. We’ve always had to do some detective work, but we now need to invest in tools to help us separate real and fake candidates because people are now shape-shifting with the help of AI.”  

The shape-shifting, it turns out, takes several forms: 

AI-Generated Resumes 

Dishonest candidates, knowing that applicant tracking systems monitor for critical keywords, have long been unafraid to game the system. Michael Mark, Head of Partnerships at TurboCheck, acknowledged a hard truth, “Fraudsters now understand how companies screen candidates and adapt accordingly.”  

Some would hide white-colored, keyword-rich text in fake “white space” to elevate their resumes in results. These copy and paste strategies gave unqualified candidates a leg up in the hiring process. Now, strategies have evolved and fake candidates are using generative AI tools to rewrite their resumes to resemble the job description.  

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using AI to offer some resume-writing pointers. Problems arise when the AI creates experience the candidate doesn’t actually have. Often, we can detect this by comparing earlier versions of their resume in our database, but we see the most counterfeit resumes fall apart by asking detailed questions about a candidate’s work. Our Alex AI Screening tool and Ropes AI tools both help us pre-screen candidates, and then our human senior recruiters are the final line of defense. 

AI Interview Assistants  

Think of these as a teleprompter for cheaters. Tools like Cluely and Interview Coder sit invisibly on a candidate’s screen, listening to interview questions in real time and generating scripted answers on the fly. The candidate’s only job is to read them aloud convincingly.  

Schumacher describes the tell: “You might hear someone pause for a long time before responding because the AI is generating the answer, or you’ll notice their eyes tracking across the screen like they’re reading a news ticker.”  

Interview Proxy Services 

There’s an entire interview proxy industry, where candidates can hire someone else to take the test entirely. Search Facebook and you’ll find open groups with tens of thousands of members, openly advertising services where IT experts can remotely control devices to complete technical assessments or answer interview questions on their behalf.  

Patrick Javier, Technical Recruiter at Benchmark IT, was even solicited directly: “A candidate reached out to me on LinkedIn. I think he has too many people in his network and mistook me for someone else, but he literally asked, ‘Hi Patrick, would you like to take my interviews for a month? You’ll get paid a hundred bucks every interview.’ It’s crazy.” 

What makes proxies particularly dangerous is that other checks often pass. A candidate’s ID is real, their location is where you’d expect them to be, and their background is clean. The scheme only unravels when they are on your payroll.  

Deepfakes 

Candidates don’t need Mission Impossible’s Ethan Hunt, with his endless budget for hyper-realistic latex masks, to trick interviewers. Deepfake technology allows candidates to digitally graft someone else’s face onto their own in real time. And this AI-powered tech is only improving.  

Interviewers used to be able to do the three-finger test, asking candidates to hold their hand in front of their face, to see if the image overlay distorts, but readily available tools like DeepFaceLive and others are fixing that issue. In short, good luck spotting a fake candidate without assistance.  

Working with the Right Staffing Firm Helps Catch Fake Candidates Early 

What’s more, fraud tactics themselves are constantly evolving. Schumacher noted that a year ago, copy-and-paste activity accounted for nearly all high-risk flags on the Ropes platform. Today it accounts for just 6%. The playbook changes fast, which means your defenses have to keep up.  

Make no mistake, AI has turned candidate validation into an arms race, but not enough companies are showing up armed. Javier sees the whole process as “a battle of tech stack versus tech stack.” Winning the fight requires technology that can spot what the human eye cannot.  

Tools like the Ropes technical assessment platform are built specifically for the fake candidate problem. When working with an IT staffing partner like Benchmark IT that uses Ropes, you weed out fake candidates while also finding high-quality candidates that fit your culture.  

The first layer is Scout, a passive fraud filter that activates the moment a candidate enters our ATS. Without any manual effort from our team, Ropes simultaneously pulls signals from phone, email, resume, LinkedIn, GitHub, and other information sources about a candidate,  surfacing inconsistencies and consolidating everything into a single view. This gives our technical recruiters a clear picture of who we’re actually vetting. 

For every technical role, Benchmark IT can generate a hands-on technical assessment that is built directly from the job description. Instead of standard tests or library tests that can be easily gamed, Ropes helps us produce project-based problems that didn’t exist before.  

With interview validation tools, this platform is also running 40 to 50 checks at once, which is critical. Schumacher makes a strong point, “one of the biggest mistakes I see [hiring managers] make is they implement a guard against one validation check, but miss a whole mountain of other issues. They end up getting a false sense of confidence.”   

Alex AI brings another dimension to Benchmark IT’s candidate validation process. Where Ropes focuses on technical assessment, Alex acts as a first-round interviewer to catch fraud. Using real-time analysis, this agentic AI recruiter monitors signals of external assistance, odd behavior (like repeating question back verbatim), or unexpected VPN activity from offshore candidates lying about their location.  

More than just using tools like Ropes and Alex AI, working with skilled recruiters means that your hiring process can move beyond failing candidates who are trying to fake their way into a job.  

Schumacher shared a story that illustrates the stakes: “The crime of all these fake candidates is that the best-looking candidates in a Boolean search aren’t the real candidates. Those candidates are often the ones who used ChatGPT to shape their resume to a particular role.” 

Using these tools, our recruiters are not only able to eliminate fake candidates, but validate real talent with tailored technical tests, promoting even more confidence in our precision recruiting process.  

At the end of the day, that’s what’s important: connecting authentic candidates with organizations where they can make a meaningful impact and making sure the fakes never get the chance. And with Benchmark IT, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to find the real talent.

Start catching fake candidates before they cost you. The tools and expertise to protect your hiring process exist and Benchmark IT has both. Let’s talk about building a candidate validation process that finds the fakes and surfaces the talent worth hiring.