Think You Won’t Be Targeted by Deepfake Candidates? Think Again.

By Pindrop’s Chief People Officer, Christine Kaszubski Aldrich

With over 25 years of experience in Human Resources, I’ve encountered countless challenges in talent acquisition—but nothing quite like the emerging threat we face today. The rise of fraudulent profiles and deepfake candidates is reshaping the hiring landscape in ways many never anticipated. Although people often perceive HR professionals as working behind the scenes, we’re actually on the front lines, protecting our organizations from this new wave of deception. As AI-driven technology advances, so does the sophistication of these fraudulent applicants, making it more critical than ever to adapt and safeguard the integrity of our hiring processes.

What are deepfake candidates?

Deepfake candidates are job applicants either completely generated by AI or having their appearance significantly altered using deepfake technology. This technology creates highly realistic fake videos, images, or audio. These candidates appear legitimate at first glance, with polished resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and even video interview capabilities that can fool recruiters and hiring managers.

Here’s the thing—many of us don’t even realize they exist, which is a threat in itself.

How are deepfake candidates created?

Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it easier than ever to generate convincing fake candidates. 

Some of the most common techniques include:

• Fake LinkedIn Profiles: AI can generate fake profile pictures and engagement history, making it difficult to detect fraudulent identities.
  
• AI-Generated Resumes & Cover Letters: Using ChatGPT or other AI models, applicants can fabricate entire work histories with compelling descriptions and industry jargon.
  
• Fabricated Work History & References: Fraudsters may list fake companies or provide references who are part of the deception.
  
• Deepfake Video Interviews: AI can manipulate real-time video feeds, allowing imposters to mimic another person’s face and voice during virtual interviews.

The impact on companies

Fraudulent job applicants are not just a concern for large corporations—they present a significant risk to small and mid-sized businesses, which often lack the resources and infrastructure to detect and mitigate more sophisticated forms of hiring fraud. For example, the FTC reported that imposter scams are the No. 1 ranked fraud category, totaling $2.9B in losses¹. This trend weakens hiring integrity and threatens a Chief HR Officer’s (CHRO) mandate to secure top talent—a key growth driver amid labor shortages and skills gaps. CHROs must employ enhanced vetting, cybersecurity strategies, and tools to protect our talent pipelines. 

Hiring a deepfake candidate can have severe and far-reaching consequences beyond simple deception and pose elevated financial, operational, security, and reputational risks, making it a critical concern for organizations across industries. 

Here’s a closer look at the potential impact:

Ransom + Extortion

Once inside a company, deepfake employees can hold systems hostage, locking critical files and demanding ransom payments. This could result in millions in losses, not just from the ransom but also from system downtime, recovery efforts, and legal fees.

Foreign Currency + Payroll Fraud

Deepfake candidates may exploit payroll systems to collect salaries while leveraging access to foreign currencies for illicit financial operations. Bad actors from sanctioned nations could use fraudulent employment to bypass financial restrictions and fund unauthorized activities.

Data Breaches + Intellectual Property Theft

These individuals can access confidential data, trade secrets, and client information, putting a company at risk of regulatory penalties, lawsuits, and loss of competitive advantage.

Customer Trust + Brand Damage

 If the public discovers that a company hired a fraudulent employee, customer confidence could erode, especially in industries where trust is paramount (e.g., banking, legal, consulting). Competitors can use this to gain market share, further compounding the loss.

Stock Price Decline

Publicly traded companies may negatively impact stock prices if news breaks that they unknowingly employed a fraudulent individual. Investors may perceive the incident as a failure in internal controls and governance, leading to devaluation and potential shareholder lawsuits.

Rehiring Costs + Lost Productivity

When a company discovers a deepfake candidate, it will have already wasted resources on onboarding, salary payments, and training. The costs of re-hiring lost productivity, and potential team turnover due to the incident can be staggering.

A disturbing reality: deepfake candidates are already here

At Pindrop, we specialize in identifying and helping our customers mitigate deepfake threats, and we’ve even faced attempts to target our hiring process. For one job posting alone, we received over 800 applications in a matter of days. When we conducted a deeper analysis of 300 candidate profiles, over one-third were fraudulent. These weren’t just candidates exaggerating their experience—these were entirely fabricated identities, many leveraging AI-generated resumes, manipulated credentials, and, most concerning, deepfake technology to simulate live interviews.

But it didn’t stop there.

Recognizing this as a serious and growing threat, we saw an opportunity to investigate further. As a company dedicated to securing real-time communications, we recognized the challenge of deepfakes long before many others. However, we never expected fraudsters to be bold enough to test our award-winning technology. Yet, they did. And when they did, we were ready. What we uncovered was even more alarming than anticipated, reinforcing the urgency for organizations to take proactive measures against deepfake infiltration before it’s too late.

The Curious Case of “Ivan X”

It started with an application for a Senior Backend Engineer position. The candidate, “Ivan X,” appeared well-qualified on paper, but during the video interview, several red flags immediately stood out:

• Unnatural Facial Movements: His facial expressions seemed slightly out of sync with his words, a telltale sign of deepfake video manipulation.
  
• Audio-Visual Lag: His voice occasionally dropped out or did not align perfectly with his lip movements.
  
• Inability to Adapt: When the interviewer asked an unexpected technical question, the candidate paused unnaturally, as if processing the response before playback.

The evidence was undeniable—our technology, Pindrop® Pulse, confirmed what we suspected: we were face-to-face with a deepfake candidate.

Pindrop Pulse for meetings

We’re extending our deepfake detection technology beyond contact centers and into video meetings. With Pulse for Meetings, organizations can safeguard virtual conversations by detecting AI-generated voices, face swaps, and synthetic avatars in real time.

Below is a teaser of the interview and our technology running in it. What you’re seeing is a bounding box around the face as we track movement across frames, analyzing for AI-generated artifacts hidden beneath. To learn more, reach out to us at [email protected].

Déjà Vu: When “Ivan X” applied again

Eight days later, Ivan X resurfaced, this time applying through a different recruiter. We had already flagged the original as fraudulent, so we decided to let the interview proceed to observe any variations.

The results were startling: 

• This time, the person who joined visually appeared different, yet he carried the same identity and credentials as the previous “Ivan X.”
  
• Within moments, he encountered connection issues, dropped from the call, and rejoined—a tactic we suspect he used to recalibrate the deepfake software.
  
• When he returned, the same audio-visual lag and facial inconsistencies were present, mirroring our previous interaction. However, the deepfake appeared to have been improved, highlighting how quickly these bad actors can improve their use of technology.

This validation reinforced our suspicions—what we encountered was not an isolated incident but a deliberate and coordinated attempt to infiltrate our hiring process using deepfake technology and synthetic identities.

Why this matters

Deepfake candidates are no longer a futuristic concern—they are an active and sophisticated attack vector infiltrating businesses today. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake². The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employers hired an average of 5 million people per month in 2024³. Assuming 3-6 interviews per hire, US hiring managers could face 45-90 million deepfake candidate profiles this year. This hyperscaling of deepfake attacks on hiring and HR practices is an unprecedented risk.

The rise of deepfake candidates isn’t just about falsified identities—it’s a direct threat to cybersecurity, corporate espionage, and data protection. What critical systems would “Ivan X” have compromised if the company had hired him? How many organizations have already unknowingly welcomed deepfake candidates into their workforce? These real-world cases highlight the growing threat:

• WSJ: Deepfakes, Fraudsters, and Hackers Are Coming for Cybersecurity Jobs
  
• BBC: Firm hacked after accidentally hiring a North Korean cybercriminal
  
• TechTarget: KnowBe4 catches North Korean hacker posing as an IT employee

While our advanced technology confirmed our findings, the unsettling truth is that most companies remain unaware of this growing threat or assume it could never happen to them. In reality, no organization is immune—especially those operating in remote-first or globally distributed environments. Fraudsters actively exploit hiring vulnerabilities in engineering, IT, finance, and beyond, seeking access to sensitive systems, proprietary data, and financial assets. Organizations lack the necessary tools and strategies to handle these risks. Many organizations depend on the vigilance of HR managers to catch fraudsters based on visual cues. Still, research shows that human intuition is not an effective and reliable method of identifying deepfakes⁴.

The implications are massive, and organizations must adapt now—because deepfake applicants aren’t just a possibility; they’re already here. The question is no longer whether attackers will target your company but when.

Are you prepared to detect and stop them before it’s too late?

Stay tuned for Part II of our blog post, “Think You Won’t Be Targeted by Deepfake Candidates? Think Again”, where we’ll explore how you and your organization can detect and verify deepfake candidates – protecting your business from critical threats that go far beyond hiring the wrong person. To learn more, reach out to us at [email protected].

Sources + Citations

¹ FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Databook, 2025

² Gartner: Predicts 2025: AI Revamps Recruitment Processes and Skills Management, 2025

³ https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf

⁴ https://synthical.com/article/c51439ac-a6ad-4b8d-82ed-13cf98040c7e