We're hiring for a software engineer right now. The amount of time our single HR professional has had to invest in sorting through scam candidates is ungodly. We had someone apply to the job three times, using different names and resumes each time. We've had two candidates who we suspected were responding to questioning with an AI tool that was listening to the interviewer's voice (poorly, which might be the only reason why we caught them). We had one candidate who said they were on the east coast, but upon further investigation, the person didn't exist; and following a hunch, upon casually bringing up that it seemed pretty dark where they were at, they disconnected from the call and we never heard from them again.
If you think these scams aren't real, you aren't looking. We're a remote company, but our policy is now to only hire candidates from internal referrals, or candidates who are in a location where someone on the team they're hiring into can grab coffee with them.