The frequency at which they show up on the front page makes me think someone's trying to build a narrative.
This is particularly concerning given that this website is also one of the tech sector's most respected hiring sites.
My main question isn't /whether/, as I have enough to go on that this is somehow deliberate. What I'm asking myself is what the ultimate goal of this is.
You do get frauds. So what? It's always been the case. It hasn't appeared out of the blue this year, so why is there now an outcry about it? It hasn't increased one bit, all things considered. People have been running bait and switch scams since before the internet existed. Read up on penpal bride scams - you send a photo of a younger, more attractive sister or daughter and entrap a prospect. Or about "flattering portrait" matrimony scams - the same thing, but using paintings, since that was done in the middle ages, before photography.
So again, why is the narrative building being done?
It got to the point where we actually had a manager suggest taking a photo of candidates when they interviewed to confirm that the person coming in when they got hired was the same person.
What I'm saying is that it's worrying that there are many front-page posts that /ask specifically about this/. It's like facebook groups being flooded with "Ask FB: anyone live close to a 5G tower and get headaches?" Most people in cities do. It's the /question/ that builds the narrative. Not your anecdote.
So again, why is this specific point being dredged up this often recently?
This sort of fraud has always been around, however covid-19 changed the equation dramatically in favour of the scammers, due to many more companies being willing and able to hire remote employees.
This has allowed the scammers to scale in ways that were previously not possible.
As the profitability increases due to scale, more scammers are attracted to it, which leads to more people experiencing it, which leads to more people talking and posting about it, which leads to those posts ending up on the front page of HN.
I don't think it's a driven narrative, however one of the consequences will be companies lowering their appetite for remote-only work.
I disagree. The same scam could be pulled any day of the year before the pandemic. And eventually those who saw the extreme profitability of this made a "plausibly deniable" outsourcing shop and ran things that way.
Now consider how many companies were willing to hire fully remote workers before the pandemic, and how many were willing to hire fully remote workers during and after the pandemic, and that will answer why the scammers have been able to scale.
Imagine if every week you got "ask hn: what's the best git tutorial?" or something equally trivial and open-ended on the front page. This simply does not seem like a natural occurrence.
Ending remote work?