Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

I had similar experiences at my last employer when hiring last fall.

In both cases, the fraud was easily made plain when I asked details about their work history. In one case, they claimed to live in the same metro area I had previously lived for 18 years, but couldn’t answer any basic questions about the place. In another situation, they claimed a workplace that was in a community I was familiar with and that was far too small to have corporate headquarters of any type I wouldn’t be familiar with.

After 5-10 minutes of probing, both candidates bailed on the interview realizing they were wasting their time.

They also exhibited some of the other signs as described at the link - no employment profiles on LinkedIn or just a basic profile, names that didn’t match their ethnicity, etc.

I have no evidence or intuition to conclude they were North Korean, as employment fraud is certainly not limited to North Korea. I can’t imagine either of the candidates I spoke to surviving even casual scrutiny, so I highly doubt this kind of fraud results in much success.

> names that didn’t match their ethnicity

The people I've known from China and Korea have a tendency to adopt traditional English names (Steve, Joe, Mike, etc) because their native names are hard to pronounce for English speakers.

Further, the 2nd generation Asian Americans I've met do often have traditional English names.

Certainly someone of obvious Asian descent and accent who introduces themselves as “Simon” is not a red flag. As you say, some people understandably prefer not to hear their real name mangled every day.

But someone of obvious Asian descent and accent who introduces themselves as “Simon Cartwright” and has vague tales of growing up in London… again, it’s possible, and we should treat each individual with respect and assumption of good intent, but that might make me dig a little deeper.

Adoption makes it entirely possible for an Asian-presenting person to have a European first name _and_ surname and, frankly, is not something you should be asked about in an interview.

Don't ask about it in the interview.

But it might be worth paying extra attention to any clues that they might not have lived in that place and have a falsified history.

As he said, "we should treat each individual with respect and assumption of good intent." But a decent proportion of people showing this particular characteristic will be engaging in employment fraud, and we shouldn't be blind to that signal.

You'd expect an adoptee to have perfect English

You can make no such assumption I'm afraid. You might expect a native speaker to have perfect English, but you'd be wrong.

There are people with issues like dyslexia and people who don't fit the education system and perform poorly.

I've met non-native speakers who have far better spelling, grammar and an enlarged vocabulary than people who have lived in my English-speaking country for their whole lives.

It's very rare for kids adopted from Asia to Europe to have an Asian accent.

I know more than one, and I don’t even live in Europe. Please avoid racial profiling, it’s a fool’s errand.

It's not racial profiling to say that people usually have an accent similar to where they grew up. Or that they usually don't have the accent of somewhere thousands of miles from where they grew up.

Agreed. It’s racial profiling to assume where someone was raised based on their name.

Of course, in theory, there's a possibility that someone named Simon Cartwright, with a North Korean accent, who has amnesia and can't remember a thing about the place they claim they grew up in, is actually not a spy. I personally don't think that's a situation where an employer is required to give the benefit of the doubt.

How many employers can reliably distinguish a North Korean accent from a South Korean one?

Quite a few South Korean descent owned and operated companies are in America. I assume that they would have a decent detection rate.

There is simply more noise than signal with this style of racial profiling and I implore you to do some soul-searching and reconsidering because you are probably harming people without even intending to with your current behavior.

It's really not that complicated...

Can you expand on what you mean? What’s not that complicated?

Life is essentially always that complicated. I have never really had a case where something was less complicated than I thought

IANAL, but I think it's flat-out illegal in the US, not just harmful. (And if it's not illegal, it should be.)

From https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices:

> An employer may not base hiring decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about a person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

The person you are responding to led with red flags about locations in their stories.

You are the only person trying to turn this into a racial issue.

Name alone is not a red flag, almost every Asian maintains an English name.

Every Chinese, dunno about other countries.

We're talking about English/European _last_ names though. Definitely possible in today's international world, but much less common.

Yeah, it's hard to know exactly what they meant by that comment, but it seems pretty presumptuous to judge whether someone's name "matches" their ethnicity for so many reasons, not the least of which is that there really isn't any way you should know for certain someone's ethnicity when they're applying at all! Asking about it in an interview is certainly illegal, and even in countries that are mostly homogeneous, there are going to be at least _some_ immigrants (maybe not for North Korea, but the entire premise of the article is that the applicants aren't claiming to be from North Korea in the first place)

What I'm still trying to figure out is how exactly the next step is supposed to work.

One of the first things we ask from both employees and freelancers is a copy of their passport/ID. Would they also have a fake ID with the name they give you (much easier to fake a PDF than a real passport) or just a story, passing you through a legit company? Or is it common to hire people without really knowing who they are?

My nephew’s last name is Brown but his mom is Vietnamese so he looks Vietnamese. Obviously a “mismatched” name isn’t red flag.

But someone named Sam Smith who supposedly grew up in an English speaking country, but barely speaks English is something that might trigger you to look further.

I’m mixed race in a visually non-obvious way. I was born and raised in the bay. What is the “correct” ethnicity that I should try to project with my name?

You have the name you have. You look the way you look. You speak the way you speak. But if you claim to have grown up in one country, or lived for X years with professional success in one city, yet can’t speak the language spoken there and can’t answer simple questions about what you did, where you lived etc? Surely you see why someone would be suspicious, especially as these circumstances add up?

I agree wholeheartedly that you can’t/shouldn’t be suspicious just because someone has an “English” name and looks East Asian, but that together with the other signs is just a bit much.

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