Last year, a “lead AI architect” applied for a job at Nisos, a company that investigates online fraud for a living. The resume mirrored Nisos’ own job posting almost word for word, including a specific phrase about evaluating emerging agentic AI tools. It also listed experience with tools that didn’t exist yet during the years the resume claimed he’d used them. During the interview, his eye movements and answers looked like someone reading a script fed to him by AI in real time. Nisos tested that theory by asking how a fabricated storm, Hurricane George, had hit his Florida home. He said the property saw some rain and wind. Nisos shipped him a work laptop anyway and watched through its camera once it arrived. On the other end sat a closet stacked with laptops, a laptop farm tied to a North Korean operation.
Nisos didn’t publish the full story until this month. The one application turned out to be a small piece of something much bigger. Between December 2024 and September 2025, the same cell submitted more than 170,000 job applications using 22 operatives. They landed 76 real job offers. Developers and engineers made up more than 70% of the roles they targeted. Gartner projects that by 2028, one out of every four job candidates worldwide will be fake in some way. A recent Checkr survey found that just 19% of hiring managers felt confident their process could catch one.
A Marketplace That Found a Bigger Problem
Den Jones is the founder and CEO of 909Cyber, a security consulting firm. Before that, he spent more than 30 years building enterprise security at Adobe, Cisco, and SonicWall. “I’ve done identity since 1992. I was a Novell guy,” he said. “And for some reason, 34 years later, I’m still doing identity.” Much of that work centered on zero trust. That’s the idea that no user or device earns automatic trust just because it sits inside the network.
Jones built 909Cyber as a consulting practice. Then he started a side project to help cybersecurity students find part-time work while they were still in school. That turned into 909Select, a freelancer marketplace for cyber, IT, and AI talent. Vetting freelancers for that marketplace surfaced a bigger problem. Candidates could pass a background check on paper. They still might not be the person who showed up for the interview, or the person who did the work afterward. Jones described a recent case where a company hired a new IT contractor and shipped him a laptop. Within 24 hours, they discovered he was a North Korean operative working through a U.S.-based laptop farm. By the time anyone asked questions, he already had access to company data. “As a cyber practitioner, for me, it’s always been about humans,” Jones said. “Humans are the front line of your defense. They’re also the front line of your culture in your company.”
Catching Fraud While the Interview Is Still Running
Shield works in real time, during the interview call itself. It starts with identity proofing: a government ID check and a biometric face scan. That scan gets hashed. It’s compared against every future video call a candidate takes on the platform, across every company using Shield. The product also pulls telemetric data during the call, IP address, location, VPN use, and checks it against threat intelligence feeds. And it watches for the eye movement and answer patterns tied to someone reading from an AI tool in real time. “With Shield, we’re talking about before you get in the door, recognizing that the other front line is who you’re allowing to come in the door,” Jones said.
What Comes Next
Companies recognize that this is a large and growing challenge. There are competitors that have built pieces of the same idea to address the problem in the past year, but Jones says 909Shield is the one that combines all of it: identity proofing, biometric continuity, telemetric risk scoring, and AI fraud detection, into one trust score. The goal is to stop proxy interviews and AI fraud before they start.
909Shield launched into that market this month. Jones says it’s priced low enough to pay for itself within the first month of avoided wasted interviews. If you’re a company facing this challenge and looking for a solution, reach out to Jones. He’s recruiting five design partners now to run it against real hiring pipelines.
