Everybody wins until the tax man comes knocking for all of the dollars owed, or when "Connor Tumbleson" gets flagged as a terrible employee when all those copy-pasted qualifications don't line up with reality and the work is mediocre. As reported elsewhere in these threads, the credentials and interview process are all worked out upfront, the interview no long becomes a valid test of qualifications for the position.

This entire scam can be done entirely legally by subcontracting the work to your foreign friend, if your clients allow for that; if the end result is of decent enough quality then I don't see why they wouldn't. You'd be on the hook if they mess up, but the same is true when you lie to your friend's employers.

However, these people choose not to go the legal route, instead relying on lies and fraud. They go as far as to hire others to do part of their lying just to get into a company.

Personally, I'd call the authorities the moment I'd find out an employee of mine has been lying about their qualifications and experience from the very first day to fake it through the interview. You cannot trust someone whose entire career is built on top of lies, or someone who actively enables such behaviour.

I'm not sure if these people are a small step up from the call center scammers because at least they deliver something or a small step down because they're supposedly capable enough to do better. I'm sympathetic to the third world programmers that have the capabilities to earn some of the absolutely insane wages American programmers get paid, but I completely oppose the large-scale fraud these lying-as-a-service middlemen employ to make money.

> who's getting hurt?

The person being impersonated. Someone is out there pretending to be them. This person is known to be willing to do unethical things. (Who knows, maybe they're also infiltrating the client's network and stealing data, installing ransomware, etc.?) Furthermore, how does the person in the US pretending to be the developer get paid? Do they actually get paid, or is that a scam, too? At any point does someone write a check to fake developer in their name? Does the IRS see that? Is the real developer now on the hook for taxes on that? There are numerous things that could go wrong and hurt the developer being impersonated, the person doing the impersonation, and the client.

There's a related scheme that I've seriously considered a time or two.

I'm a pretty good software engineer, and they pay me very well, but I've got absolute shit executive functioning skills. Task management, remembering to email people back, and the like are challenging to me. It has occurred to me that a full time personal assistant in my area typically makes about $50,000/year. I think there's a decent chance that, with such a support, my own salary could go up by $200k or more over the next couple of years. I've frequently entertained the notion of hiring someone to basically support me in my job without telling my employer, since there's zero chance they'd get me such an assistant and similarly zero chance they'd let me pay for my own.

I wouldn't ultimately do it because, y'know, all the dishonesty involved, but it'd probably be a good deal for everybody involved. My employer gets better work for the same money, my assistant gets stable work, and I get promoted.

Say you do it... the company pays you $100/h (making up a number to do math) and $70 of that goes to the person who does the job while you keep $30 of it.

Guess how much gets reported to the IRS that you're making and how much taxes you'll owe on that $100/h.

Next there's the fraudulent representation of who is doing the work to the client.

Lastly, there's the "this is a form of money laundering" and you're taking a significant role.

When this starts to unravel, you're not going to come out ahead.

I think that the key point is, this kind of thing _is_ legit, if you are honest about what's happening. The dev is foreign, we have a local project manager to handle communications. This is not uncommon. If you are a foreign programmer actually able to program, this is how you would do it.

If you DON'T do it this way, but instead get an actor to play a local dev, then it is because you cannot actually program, and therefore need to borrow someone else's identity to get contracts.

I’m kind of at a loss that these propositions would be taken at face value. Imagine for a moment that these “talented web developer groups” whom you are essentially representing with your name attached to them are bad foreign state actors in disguise. Imagine what would happen to you if some malicious piece of code made it on some website processing personal information, payments, or worse. It’s eye-opening and really terrifying people don’t even consider this possibility, in 2022.

From the perspective of the company, there's immediate concerns around sensitive information, intellectual property, corporate/government espionage -- none of which seem unlikely in positions premised on flexible morals.

IMO if there were registered/regulated, established services that filled this need and handled the VISA/background check process then I wonder if companies might be willing to work with overseas developers more.

Is not this, more or less, what all consulting companies do? Take 30% and let someone else do the job?

It's the impersonation of real people that is the danger here. If they were generating fake people, then perhaps it might not be so bad, but as it stands there is legal, reputational, and possible other types of damage at risk to the people being impersonated

Apart from the identity fraud and the issue of trusting a random person you don't know, the situation sounds similar to an outsourcing company. As a developer you are in a good position to evaluate other developers on their skills too.

It's generally all the OTHER details that people conveniently skim over in these descriptions that get people hurt, or the less obvious exposure to unexpected risks for the counterparty.

As a (pretty common) comparison - if a gay man marries a woman, has kids, does the whole couple thing and blends in, but periodically goes to clubs or gay bars, or has a boyfriend on the side, who are they really hurting?

What about the equivalent straight man with a mistress on the side? Or two? Or the woman with a side man?

Well, as long as everything goes perfect, I guess just themselves by pretending to be someone they aren't most of their lives and having to lie to everyone every day. And certainly the cards have been stacked against them in a great number of societies and environments (to the point of death penalties in some cases if they don't hide), so it's hard to blame them for hiding doing it in those situations if they really can't stop.

But it almost never just goes perfectly forever does it? Eventually, either someone finds out (and now they're exposed to blackmail risk, or a bitter divorce and lots of bad publicity), or someone gets sick with something they shouldn't have been able to, or pregnant, or whatever. There were a decent number of counterparties in supposedly monogamous relationships over the years that have gotten diseases they should not have been able to get, including HIV, from this type of stuff. It can trigger severe emotional trauma in people. Folks get killed over this kind of thing somewhat frequently.

From a corporate equivalent, think - traceable customer information leak. Or attackers get control of the corporate network through a hidden VPN endpoint configured to allow these contractors in to do things, and do things from crypto-ransom the company to outright rob the company blind.

An acquaintance at a company I only briefly worked at years ago got busted for siphoning MILLIONS of dollars through phony affiliates he'd setup at the company. He was in charge of the affiliate program. I never cared for him, and wasn't particularly surprised, and was part of the reason I left once I saw what I had gotten myself into, but it was a good cautionary tale.

The company had been really happy with overall performance, they just hadn't noticed the extra 'tax' they were paying him until he did something else sketchy and they started looking closer.

The reason to avoid doing sketchy things, is because they inevitably have hidden costs, from cognitive overhead from constantly tracking all the lies, to real risks of extreme bad problems that others are being exposed to. It's often lucrative enough however, that there is always the temptation.

It's why 'sunshine is the best disinfectant' is still so true.

After all, generally if everyone was actually comfortable with it and it's side effects, there would be no need to be sketchy about it.