80% of applicants with experience matching our stack were North Koreans

Hmm all those added together are dubious but:

> Unable to find these applicants online outside of the standard professional networking sites (e.g. no presence on GitHub, social media etc).

My github account only has private repos and you as a prospective employer have no business searching me on social media. Social media is for my friends.

> Highly scripted answers with explicit preference for remote work, and little ability to deviate from the script.

Why is "preference for remote work" in there?

I don’t necessarily doubt the story, but it feels eerily close to a Facebook post. Does a trust and safety company have anything to gain from a blog post about secret North Korean sleeper agents infiltrating your company to send resources back to its dictatorship regime?

You'd think that a pretty straightforward reference check would be enough to weed these applicants out. But I suppose if you are hiring internationally without a ton of confidence in your field org, that would make it hard to do.

I can confirm coming across the exact same kind of profile, but in Europe. Most we found on LinkedIn keyword searches, some applied directly. I've taken a couple of interviews to confirm and indeed it was a scam, they didn't know anything about the country, the companies, or the schools in their resume.

Many times the signs are rather obvious, the keywords are right but everything about the profile is just off and doesn't stand to even a bit of scrutiny. I suspect it's done on purpose, just like Nigerian scams, to optimize for gullible or inattentive companies.

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41256872 But it didn't get any comments