My first day as a technical interview proxy for North Korea
First week and a half, actually...
TL;DR
Scam artists, some from North Korea, are targeting remote jobs for salaries & corporate espionage & my insider experience suggests that hiring companies could be doing a lot more to defend themselves against scammers. See my recommendations below!
The Start of My Adventure
At approximately 11:56 AM on December 9th, 2025, while I was browsing the Internet on my laptop at my girlfriend’s apartment, I was contacted through Slack on the ReactOnRails Slack workspace by a man who said he wanted to discuss a great opportunity with me.
Since I was a little manic at the moment, I agreed to video conference and send him a Google Meet link. On Google Meet, I found myself talking to an Asian man, possibly Korean, with purple colored hair, who used the username Samuel Miller. This man first requested a link to my LinkedIn profile, which he quickly reviewed. He then informed me of his opportunity, which he described as a “work proxy service”: he said he connected to United States developers with developers overseas, who would work under the table, enabling the United States developer to acquire multiple jobs. Income from those jobs would be split 30% to the overseas developers, 30% of this man (Samuel Miller), and 40% to me. He asked if I felt comfortable with this and I assured him that I was here, then he sent me a phone number and asked me to connect to it on WhatsApp. I did so and then I was sent a message that he said out loud.
However, in hindsight, I believe that I was communicating with someone else through WhatsApp as their English fluency was flawless while the person I communicated with on Slack skipped some words and had to ask me to clarify my statement that “I’m curious”, which was my initial response to hearing about this great opportunity. I was then sent a résumé through WhatsApp and the man on Google Meet asked me if I would be comfortable using the name and details of the résumé during an interview, which he said that he had already scheduled for me. Again, I assured the man that I was comfortable with all the details I had received thus far.
The man then shared his screen on Google Meet and showed me a weekly calendar full of appointments, then asked me when was the soonest that I could start. I told him I could start the next day. The man then ended the meeting, saying that he look forward to working with me. Shortly afterward I was asked on WhatsApp and asked if I was comfortable using ChatGPT or another AI to “cheat” in interviews involving languages outside of my professional experience, such as Java or Go.
(If this recap here looks weird, I’m largely just dictating the police affidavit that I wrote. Feel free to do an open records request with East Texas A&M University re Incident #251209012A for more details.)
Since Then
...I have been assigned interviews by my handlers at 12 different companies: Here’s a copy of the latest Google Spreadsheet revision.
* I warned Kevin Cambell with Yahoo. He seemed to have a hard time getting out of the interviewer mindset. I will always remember, after I told him a short summary of my story, his reply of “It sounds like you really don’t want the role...”. No shit, Kevin.
* I warned Monica Oswal with Xero. She got it. I actually think she already knew there was something wrong with the application.
* I warned Collin Allison with Tractian. Blew his fucking mind, but he assured me that he had seen bait & switch tactics like this before with H1B’s & would be sure to improve his recruiting strategy accordingly. I sure hope so as Tractian looks like they are working on some bleeding edge tech.
* I warned Sheila MacLean with SysDig. Blew her mind as well, which was kind of funny since SysDig is all about Cybersecurity. But she & SysDig handled it well, with Stefan Reicheneder, their head of Security & Compliance reaching out himself to request further information.
* I warned Kaitlin Pham who was recruiting for Carrum Health. Blew her mind also, but she asked for all the details & handled it like a real pro. If Boulevard Recruiting has more like her, then I know who I would want handling my company’s recruiting for remote jobs.
* I warned James Klein with EscrowSafe. He handled it well & later told me through LinkedIn that he had alerted his entire team, who couldn’t believe that I would do such a public service without getting something out of it. I told James that I did everything for this awesome blog post. It is awesome, right? 🥺
* Hannah Xu with ITC canceled our interview before it even began. I’m curious if there was any particular type of red flag that caught her attention.
* I tried warning Avery, ITC’s AI interviewer. Not sure if I succeeded, because I played most of the interview straight (never hurts to get free practice, right?)
* I warned Shaoyen Chang & Manoj Chavali of Synchrony. Chang said that he had noticed one yellow flag, which was that the fake resume seemed really heavy for the particular role that they were trying to fill. One of the shortest technical interviews I’ve ever had.
* I warned Ryan Kolatalo with Dick’s Sporting Goods. He was a good sport (sorry 😅) and offered me the role any way, but it was focused on Database Administration with SQL Oracle, so a bit outside my comfort zone (I’m pretty comfortable with basic SQLite3 & Postgresql features, although RubyOnRails’ ORM usually makes it so I don’t have to consider which relational database I’m actually using).
* I warned Samrat Jeyaprakash, Marcela Colimodio, Tania Aguirre, and Marco Cornejo of Tram Case through LinkedIn’s Sale Navigator after Samrat, Tram Case’s CTO, skipped out on an interview we were supposed to have. Not that an interview with a CTO is that big a deal when Tram Case only has 8 or so employees, but I was still looking forward to saying I warned a member of the C-suite in-person. Maybe next time 🥲
* I warned Todd Janss with Aha!. Aha! seems like a really awesome company for someone like me, just bursting with manic ideas, so I’m really glad that Todd took my report seriously and said that he would keep an eye out for the scammer signals that I mention in the recommendations section below.
* I warned Elaine Chai with Temu. This interview was a bit of a surprise to me until Elaine explained that Temu is expanding out of China into the U.S. & Ireland for data sovereignty reasons.
* I warned Hanna Niapas with Groq. She handled the situation well & demanded I let her know as soon as my blog post was published!
* I warned Kyle Brazeau with SafelyYou. This interview didn’t go too well for me because Kyle already had his guard up. Seems like he had already identified some flags within the resume itself. Kyle, I hope this blog post provides a better explanation than I did through Google Meet. 😅
* I warned John Samuelson with his stealth startup. He was pretty surprised, but he handled it well. Finally got my C-suite interview! 😎
* I warned Anna (Burns) Ciell with Zus Health. She welcomed the information I provided her, saying that it helped explain certain patterns that she had been seeing in recent applicants. More details in the recommendations section below!
I’ll update with more interviews for as long as these scammers let me interview for them. It’s not looking good for me, however, as my handlers have noted that none of the companies I’ve interviewed with have provided them with a positive update. 😅
In addition to interviews, these scammers have also said that they are sending me a fake I.D. so I can perform drug screens for background checks. They have also asked me to embellish my UpWork & LinkedIn profiles (They apparently have better luck with UpWork than LinkedIn right now, to no one’s surprise). And finally, they have asked me to create a LLC bank account so that I can send or receive funds through Relay.
Links to actual fake LinkedIn Profiles
Here’s every LinkedIn profile url from the fake resumes I was given:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-roble/ last name on resume is robles, however.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattodevs/ (Matthew Owens)
Recommendations
* A strong signal that will be short-lived is that a scam artists are generally using LinkedIn profiles that have no profile picture. Scammers avoid profile pictures because they don’t want to have to update the picture whenever changing proxies (LinkedIn: y’all need to enable users to see how often a profile picture changes.)
* Also lack of LinkedIn recommendations by real people or only having recommendations that don’t talk about having face-to-face, in-person communication is another red flag. In fact, Anna Ciell points out that this discrepancy applies to anything that requires time to build: scam profiles are unlikely to have many LinkedIn connections or a github account that has any real activity.
* The names of the LinkedIn profiles are generally reused because they are connected to actual people in order to pass background checks. Therefore, any LinkedIn profile that doesn’t have a unique name or has numbers in their URL gets a yellow flag, especially if some of the other LinkedIn profiles with similar names look sus.
* A valuable safeguard would be requiring every candidate to send a message from their LinkedIn profile to you during the intro interview (or, better yet, to call you by phone while on video), because I assume that other interview proxies do not currently have access to the email, phone, or LinkedIn profiles listed on the resumes, as our handlers control all forms of communication with the companies outside of the interviews themselves.
* Scam artists will adapt to every single safeguard you create, so please assume that each of my suggestions has a relatively short shelf-life. LinkedIn recommendations from real people talking about in-person interaction is by far the most secure, yet rarest green flag.
* Scam artists build their resumes specifically for automated screening systems. Maybe it’s time that we start focusing on the resumes that get filtered out instead? You know, like how a chess grandmaster will sometimes start with a suboptimal opening move to throw off their opponent because the optimal opening moves have been analyzed to death.
* According to my handlers: “Actually, you don’t need to talk based on resume. Resume is just resume for scheduling more interviews. In the interviews, you must pretend to have all experience with all requirements to pass the interview. This is the point.” So... maybe try asking about a framework or library that doesn’t exist? Idk. I got this coaching 14 interviews in so it might not be very relevant. 😂
* With the way that the job market is right now, if you have any doubt, throw the application out!
Sequel Hook
Actually, the fake I.D. has already been delivered to my house. I’ll provide more details on that once the Secret Service concludes their investigation.
I think I can get away with saying that if you work for Coinbase HR & you have a job applicant, likely for senior software engineer, named “Ben Ray Robles Gomez” who is having trouble scheduling their drug screening, then you need to take a second look at everything about their application.
Also, I recently made contact with someone who says that they have been harassed by the Lazarus Group, so, depending on how credible his report seems, I might write up an article on that.
Finally
If you made it all the way to the bottom of my article, then you’re obviously starving for unique content, so please check out the rest of my blog & subscribe for future thought-provoking articles, such as my attempt to trigger a marxist revolution in a global, remote-focused dev shop (The Russians didn’t like the idea. Lenin must be rolling in his grave right now.)
As always, let me know your thoughts!
I hope to hear from you soon!