A company interviewed a candidate who crushed every technical question. Then they tried to actually hire the guy -- and found out he wasn't real. It was AI.
What the CEO Described
Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of the AI-model evaluation company Arena, described the problem on the "20VC" podcast:
"They're passing all of our technical interviews," he said. "And then what happens at the end of it? You try to hire them, and it's vaporware."
He described the applicants as "fake people applying to companies" -- Arena's own engineers had interviewed candidates and believed they were real, right up until the point of actually onboarding them.
Arena's response: in-person verification going forward. "If you want a laptop, you got to come to the office. We got to go and shake your hand. We got to verify that you're real."
It's Bigger Than One Company
This isn't an isolated incident. In a 2025 alert, the FBI warned that North Korean IT workers had used AI and face-swapping technology in video interviews to conceal their identities and secure remote roles at more than 100 US companies. Coinbase now requires in-person orientation for all new hires; Amazon has deployed AI screening specifically to catch suspected North Korean applicants.
The Scale
Per Gartner: in a Q2 2025 survey of 3,000 job candidates, 6% admitted to interview fraud. Gartner expects one in four candidate profiles worldwide to be fake by 2028.
Source: https://www.aol.com/articles/fake-ai-job-candidates-forcing-123532000.html (Business Insider reporting, Thibault Spirlet)