[maestroia]

While remote work has made it easier and more prevalent, "hiring fraud" has been around forever. Especially in larger corporations, where interviewing was done by loosely associated teams, and the faces of all the in-person candidates blended together or were rapidly forgotten. I personally witnessed this 3 or 4 times back in the 90's, while an employee of a Fortune 5 company.

Contracting agencies were the worst with the bait-and-switch game though, even prior to H-1Bs.

[clusterhacks]

Yes! I have a long-ish tenure at my current org (10+ years). I have had at least two co-workers in that time window who were clearly having someone else do their work assignments off-hours.

Honestly, it kind of worked for them. I was very naive about it and it took me a long time to realize that the reason both co-workers could not discuss technical issues at work (or "their" own code) was that they simply didn't know anything (and it wasn't "their" code). As far as I know, only a very small number of tech people suspected anything.