The Rise of Employment Fraud

Employment fraud is surging. As companies shift to remote-first hiring, the traditional safeguards that came with in-person onboarding, walking into an office, presenting an ID to HR, meeting your team face-to-face, have disappeared. In their place: a video call, an email, and a set of credentials that may or may not belong to the person using them.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has reported increases in complaints related to fraudulent job applicants and identity theft in the hiring process. The problem spans industries, from tech companies unknowingly hiring North Korean IT workers using stolen American identities, to healthcare organizations discovering that credentialed employees never actually held the degrees they claimed.

Hiring fraud isn't just a financial risk. It's a security risk. A fraudulent employee with access to internal systems, customer data, or proprietary code represents an active threat, not a background check failure, but a breach in progress.

The scale of the problem is difficult to measure precisely because most cases go undetected. When a fraudulent hire performs adequately, there's no trigger for investigation. The fraud surfaces months or years later, if it surfaces at all.

Who Is at Risk?

Any company that hires remotely is exposed. But the risk is highest for organizations that grant system access quickly, handle sensitive data, or lack a dedicated HR function to manage onboarding checks. Startups, government contractors, and companies scaling rapidly through staffing agencies are particularly vulnerable.

What Can You Do?

Background checks verify that a name has a clean record, but they don't confirm the person applying is the owner of that name. In-person identity verification closes this gap by requiring a real person to appear at a confirmed location with a government-issued photo ID, verified by a state-licensed notary.