davidbhead

This horror story is what happens when you prioritize growth before anyone loves your product

I've thought about the same thing. My company specializes in blocking candidate fraud and we have yet to see anyone who's sentiment isn't "get these people out of here".

Employing a North Korean can create sanctions and criminal risk, so it's not worth it.

From what I've heard from people who have accidentally hired them though, many are great engineers.

The sophistication of these guys is high. They're hiring US citizens to interview for them and then if they get hired, their work quality is high so they fly under the radar for awhile.

Founder of Endorsed here. We help employers block situations like these where job seekers are collaborating with the scammers.

As other have pointed out, there are multiple types of scammers here.

The most benign are people who just want US salaries. The most malicious is North Korea who will go as far as installing ransomware and infiltrating financial institutions (especially crypto) to steal user money.

We know North Korea is much of the problem since the FBI gets involved in the malicious cases that I described and they publish reports. It’s hard to tell though because companies want to keep news they are infiltrated as quiet as possible.

I’m not sure which type of fraudster sent you this email other than the rate they are saying they will pay (50%) is exceptionally high. We know the North Koreans pay 10% for using your identity for ID verification etc, and 20% if you are the front man.

Nostrademons wrote a great comment about how they can use your identity here in problematic ways. I’m not sure how much this has happened since I have yet to hear about it in private stories from employers, who tend to be pretty candid. From what I can tell the fraudsters want to stay under the radar and be employed as long as possible. A lot are great engineers so they pull it off.

That said, rarely do people want to talk about this topic who are involved so it’s hard to tell what fully happens in each scenario.

I'm wondering why it's just now they've become popular. Maybe they just needed a successful initial usecase and found it in Lambda School (unless I'm missing another successful ISA use case before Lambda School).

Regardless, it's great to see Modern Treasury build a solution to make ISAs simpler to implement.

2nded

This is awesome. Segment has always been a tool that speeds up our experimentation dramatically but the cost has been tough to swallow. I’m grateful your team has built this new program!

Kindof. It could evolve into something like a forum (presuming that's what you're meaning). Right now we're focused on strictly getting the end-users problems solved as fast as possible by connecting them with freelancers via screenshare.

Does that clarify?

Bingo :)

I hear you on Zapier! I was in the same boat initially. I actually built the initial prototype for Sixty using Zapier and Google Sheets. Then built it on Bubble.is until we got Andrew (our technical co-founder) on the team. Wished I had experts on both of them the entire time.

Have a ton of great Shopify experts :)

All of this is correct.

Both parties are our target audience. Our goal is to partner with the SaaS companies and give them control over the freelancer ecosystems. We're also building for the end-user though because we think that mindset will ultimately result in the best product for them.

Does this make sense? I can see how it's confusing.

Yes to everything except the embed.

We have a lot of ideas for embeds! Right now, the product is a subdomain (experts.[domain].com) that SaaS companies can link to from their site & support.

Would love to have you as a user! Which tools do get stuck on most frequently?

Appreciate your feedback here. Can definitely see ways we can improve the messaging. I know you're asking some questions to probe our thinking but I'll answer them here anyway for clarity.

Marketplaces are good because a lot of times, users want someone to just do it for them rather than teaching themselves with docs, tutorials, and forums. There's always a time tradeoff and sometimes it's worth it to just pay someone. This is why there are https://experts.mailchimp.com, https://www.google.com/partners, etc. We make adding this layer service more accessible to SaaS companies–and it's a 10x better service for the end user because of our technology.

'Expert' is our term for the freelancer. They're an expert of the software itself. So a Google AdWords expert, or a Mailchimp Expert.