There was a story about a developer from IBM that hired somebody, and was only discovered because the inbound VPN IP was from a different country.
Not the same one in all likelihood though.
Being able to find and get repeatable good results from contractors across the globe and manage them is a skill in itself.
It's true that unscrupulous people are often very effective. But it's also true that they are unscrupulous. Leaning into lack of scruples probably isn't the most stable of pro business strats, but I imagine it works out sometimes.