When AI Goes Rogue: Real Stories of Candidate Fraud Keeping Us on Our Toes

Hi everyone—I’m Hannah, and over the past few months, I’ve been sitting down with Member Service Leads and recruiting pros across industries. One theme keeps bubbling up: AI isn’t just helping candidates prep better resumes—it’s opening doors to new kinds of fraud that are tripping up even the savviest teams. I wanted to share a few of the stories we’ve heard, so you know you’re not alone in this challenge.

“I Swore They Were Real—Until They Weren’t”

One of our Member Service Leads recounted a shocker from a high-prestige tech firm:

“We scheduled a full day of interviews with a candidate who not only had a flawless resume but gave polished, confident answers in our video screeners. It wasn’t until our engineering team ran a live coding test that we realized the ‘candidate’ was a deepfake audio loop—literally someone parroting answers generated by AI.”

Imagine carving out that time, only to discover you’ve been talking to a voice-modulated script. That kind of experience shatters trust—both in your process and in the technology you’ve come to rely on.

“We Went from 200 to 1,200 Apps—No Extra Hands”

At Olympus, a one-person Early Careers team saw applications jump from 200 to 1,200 practically overnight—with zero headcount growth to help sift through them all. And it wasn’t just quantity that spiked:

“We started seeing dozens of applications with the exact same cover-letter phrasing, down to the same typos and line breaks. It was blatant AI-copy reuse, and it made us wonder if any of these candidates even engaged with our brand or mission.”

When generic, AI-cloned text floods your inbox, your team’s ability to connect with genuine talent grinds to a halt—and your employer brand takes a hit when you can’t respond personally.

“We’re Losing Top Talent to the Noise”

At Cognizant, they’ve leaned into AI screening tools to rank candidates—but even those systems are being gamed:

“We thought our match-score algorithm would surface the cream of the crop. Instead, we saw people reverse-engineer job descriptions with AI prompts to hit every keyword. Our top-ranked candidates often turned out to be the least qualified in follow-up conversations.”

When everyone appears to check every box, recruiters end up spending even more time on the phone, trying to untangle who really gets it—and who just got lucky with a prompt.

“We Need to Build Fraud Detection into Day One”

Across smaller teams, the message is unanimous: the minute you flip “Apply” live, you need fraud-prevention tactics baked into your process. Our members are experimenting with:

• Knock-out questions on sponsorship or location, to weed out mass-applicants.
• Live problem-solving sessions (e.g., whiteboard challenges) that AI can’t fake in real time.
• AI-powered fraud flags, such as voice-pattern anomalies in video screens.
  

 

But building those layers takes time—and in many orgs, navigating ATS, legal, and compliance approvals can take weeks, by which point bots have already run wild.

What’s Working (and What’s Next)

From these conversations, a few guiding principles have emerged:

1. Human-Centered Checkpoints
   Even the best AI tools can’t replicate spontaneous follow-up questions or probing on personal stories. Embedding quick live touchpoints—like 5-minute “coffee chat” calls—can trip up the fraudsters.
2. Collaborate Early with Compliance
   Map your approval chains in advance. If you know legal and HRIS teams need sign-off on new screening questions, bring them into planning discussions before the applications go live.
3. Lean on Your Community
   We’re compiling a shared repository of the most effective fraud-detection questions and live-coding challenges our members have used. If you’ve found something that works, let us know.
4. Treat Fraud Like a Continuous Threat
   Just as you’d patch security vulnerabilities in your tech stack, build periodic reviews of your screening process—looking specifically for new AI-driven tactics.
   

 

---

You’re Not Alone—and We’re Here to Help

We know these stories can feel overwhelming. But they’re also proof that the member community is out there, learning and innovating in real time. Over the next few months, our Research team will be rolling out a Fraud Prevention Toolkit—complete with sample screening questions, live-coding prompts, and templates for navigating approvals. Stay tuned for more details, and please keep sharing your stories so we can keep this conversation—and our collective defenses—strong.

Thanks for all you do,

Hannah

Director of Member Experience, Veris Insights